Quotes by Charles Simic

“A true confession: I believe in a soluble fish.”

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

“One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.”

“Like many others, I grew up in an age that preached liberty and built slave camps.”

“Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.”

“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.”

“Poetry is an orphan of silence.”

“The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.”

“Memory, all-night's bedside tattoo artist.”

“The ProdigalDark morning rainMeant to fallOn a prison and a schoolyard,Falling meanwhileOn my mother and her old dog.How slow she shuffles nowIn my fathers Sunday shoes.The dog by her sideTrembling...”

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

“For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.”

“Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.”

“Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.”

“Once I knew, then I forgot. It was as if I had fallen asleep in a field only to discover at waking that a grove of trees had grown up around me. Doubt nothing, believe everything, was my friends id...”

“Memory, all-night's bedside tattoo artist.”