Quotes from Charles Simic

There was a movie theater here once. It played silent films. It was like watching the world through dark glasses on a rainy evening. One night the piano player mysteriously disappeared. We were left with the storming sea that made no sound, and a beautiful woman on a long, empty bench whose tears rolled down silently as she watched me falling asleep in my mother's arms.

Most of the American films were made in southern California, so if you were in Europe, watching those palm trees swaying in the wind with someone like Rita Hayworth gliding underneath them in a white convertible, you got all kinds of wonderfully wrong ideas about the place.

In the dark to see, you ass-scratchers! In the dark to see.

Time—the lizard in the sunlight. It doesn't move, but its eyes are wide open.

Filosóficamente no puede confiarse en los ojos.

It's that hum in your left ear, A sigh coming from deep within you, A dream in which you keep falling forever, The hour in which you sit up in bed As though someone has shouted your name.

I could never free myself from the thought that Nature is that which is slowly killing me.

They wheeled out the ash blonde who believes herself already dead into the spike-fenced garden of the hospital for the insane. Her name was Amy or Ann, but she didn't answer to either one. She kept her eyes tightly shut. [...] Some of it was told to me by a shivering young man who insisted that it's been raining for years, even indoors. "Coming down real hard," he said.

I write to annoy God, to make Death laugh. I write because I can't get it right.

To be conscious is already to be divided, to be multiple.

Did she believe in God? Yes and no. God is the cunning of all these boxes fitting inside each other, perhaps? More likely, God is just another box. Neither the tiniest one nor the biggest imaginable. There are boxes even God knows nothing of.

You can not shoe a flea," Russians say. Whoever coined the proverb forgot about poets.

Estranged from family and friends While racking our brains whether The world we see is truly out there, Or it never leaves our minds.

The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen, if recognized.

Not the least charm of this tableau is that it can be so easily dismissed as preposterous.

I love America," he'd tell us. We were going to make a million dollars manufacturing objects we had seen in dreams that night.

Here's what Nietzsche said to the ceiling: "The rank of the philosopher is determined by the rank of his laughter." But he couldn't really laugh.

And all of a sudden In the midst of that quiet, It seems possible To live simply on this earth.

The purpose of poetry is to return that which is familiar to its original strangeness.

Tending a cliff-hanging Grand Hotel In a country ravaged by civil war. My heart as its only bellhop. My brain as its Chinese cook.

The old woman dressing a small child for slaughter In a convent's school uniform. The ceiling pale as the flowers. The red parrot screaming in the parrot house.

I like the silence between us, The quiet–that holy state even the rain Knows about. Listen to her begin to fall, As if with eyes closed, Muting each drop in her wild-beating heart. — Charles Simic, closing lines to "This Morning," A Wedding in Hell (Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994)

At the hairdresser's a girl leaps out of a chair, Her blond hair bouncing off her bare shoulders As she runs out the door in her high heels. "I must be off," says the handsome boy to his grandmother. His bicycle is where he left it. He rides it casually through the heavy traffic His white shirttails fluttering behind him Long after everyone else has come to a sudden stop.

Scribbled in the Dark  A shout in the street. Someone locking horns with his demon. Then, calm returning. The wind tousling the leaves. The birds in their nests Pleased to be rocked back to sleep. Night turning cool. Streams of blood in the gutter Waiting for sunrise.