32 Inspiring Thoughts By Charles Simic
Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with posters advertising faraway places.
Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all others were making ships.
If I believe in anything, it is in the dark night of the soul. Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.
He who cannot howl will not find his pack.
If the sky falls they shall have clouds for supper.
Silence is the only language god speaks.
I left parts of myself everywhere, The way absent-minded people leave Gloves and umbrellas Whose colors are sad from dispensing so much bad luck
One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.
For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.
The stars know everything, So we try to read their minds. As distant as they are, We choose to whisper in their presence.
Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.
When people ask me how to find happiness in life I tell them, First learn how to cook.
Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket
While you sit Like a rain puddle in hell Knitting the socks Of your life.
When you play chess alone it's always your move.
Charles Simic, when asked what he thought of Slam Poetry events: "They are fun, but they have as much to do with poetry as Elvis Presley had to do with Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk".
Poetry is an orphan of silence.
Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.
A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights.
Making art in America is about saving one's soul.
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.
In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-class parents who do not allow their children to play in the street.
To submit to chance is to reveal the self and its obsessions.
A true confession: I believe in a soluble fish.
Sleeplessness is like metaphysics. Be there. -Charles Simic
The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.
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.
The idea is to spin the wheel of metaphors and images until sparks of associations begin to fly for the reader.
It was only the sea sounding weary After so many lifetimes Of pretending to be rushing off somewhere And never getting anywhere.
Inside is where we meet everyone else; it's on the outside that we are truly alone.
