Quotes from Charles Simic

The poem I want to write is impossible. A stone that floats.

I slept little, read a lot, and fell in love frequently.

Lyric poets are always corrupting the young, making them choke in self-pity and indulge in reverie. Dirty sex and direspect for authority is what they have been whispering into their ears for ages.

Inside is where we meet everyone else; it's on the outside that we are truly alone.

Thoreau loved ants. He'd meet one in the morning and spend the whole day talking to him.

Nationalism is a self-constructed cage in which family members can huddle in safety when they're not growling and barking at someone outside the cage.

The idea is to spin the wheel of metaphors and images until sparks of associations begin to fly for the reader.

??????? ????? ??? ?? ??????? ???? ???? ?????? ?? ??? ?????? ? ????????? ?? ?? ?????? :: Watermelons Green Buddhas On the fruit stand. We eat the smile And spit out the teeth.

Are Russian cannibals worse than the English? Of course. The English eat only the feet, the Russians the soul. "The soul is a mirage," I told Anna Alexandrovna, but she went on eating mine anyway.

The stone is a mirror which works poorly. Nothing in it but dimness. Your dimness or its dimness, who's to say? In the hush your heart sounds like a black cricket.

Dear Friedrich, the world's still false, cruel and beautiful...

Because the light is always with us and the hush of an early morning time propitious to plain speech space between the premonition and the event the small lovely realm of the possible.

Memory, all-night's bedside tattoo artist.

I remember," someone said, "how in ancient times one could turn a wolf into a human and then lecture it to one's heart's content.

It was only the sea sounding weary After so many lifetimes Of pretending to be rushing off somewhere And never getting anywhere.

History is a cookbook. The tyrants are chefs. The philosophers write menus. The priests are waiters. The military men are bouncers. The singing you hear is the poets washing dishes in the kitchen.

On this Very Street in Belgrade" Your mother carried you Out of the smoking ruins of a building And set you down on this sidewalk Like a doll bundled in burnt rags, Where you now stood years later Talking to a homeless dog, Half-hidden behind a parked car, His eyes brimming with hope As he inched forward, ready for the worst.

I insist on remaining aloof, self-absorbed, lovingly nursing my suspicions.

This strange thing must have crept Right out of hell. It resembles a bird's foot Worn around the cannibal's neck. As you hold it in your hand, As you stab with it into a piece of meat, It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird: Its head which like your fist Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.

Everyone vain, dull, peevish, and sexually frustrated dreams of legislating his impotence. Mao's uniforms: a billion people dressing the same and shouting from his little red book continues to be the secret hope of new visionaries.

My mother was a braid of black smoke. She bore me swaddled over the burning cities. The sky was a vast and windy place for a child to play. We met many others who were just like us. They were trying to put on their overcoats with arms made of smoke. The high heavens were full of little shrunken deaf ears instead of stars.

War The trembling finger of a woman Goes down the list of casualties On the evening of the first snow. The house is cold and the list is long. All our names are included.

And of course, for all we know, I might be a hundred years old already, and she just a sleepy little girl with glasses.

In the circle of yellow lamplight, These few roof-beams and columns Of what could be a Mogul Emperor's palace. The Prince chews his long nails, The Princess lowers her green eyelids. They both smoke too much, Never go to bed before daybreak.