Top 60 Charles Simic Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “He who cannot howl will not find his pack.”

— Charles Simic

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

— Charles Simic

3. “Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all others were making ships.”

— Charles Simic

4. “If I believe in anything, it is in the dark night of the soul. Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.”

— Charles Simic

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

— Charles Simic

6. “Silence is the only language god speaks.”

— Charles Simic

7. “Poetry is an orphan of silence.”

— Charles Simic

8. “The stars know everything, So we try to read their minds. As distant as they are, We choose to whisper in their presence.”

— Charles Simic

9. “When you play chess alone it’s always your move.”

— Charles Simic

10. “Poems are other people’s snapshots in which we see our own lives.”

— Charles Simic

11. “Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with posters advertising faraway places.”

— Charles Simic

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

— Charles Simic

13. “When people ask me how to find happiness in life I tell them, First learn how to cook.”

— Charles Simic

14. “Here is something we can all count on. Sooner or later our tribe always comes to ask us to agree to murder.”

— Charles Simic

15. “The plain truth is we are going to die. Here I am, a teeny spec surrounded by boundless space and time, arguing with the whole of creation, shaking my fist, sputtering, growing even eloquent at times, and then-poof! I am gone. Swept off once and for all. I think that is very, very funny.”

— Charles Simic

16. “I was already dozing off in the shade, dreaming that the rustling trees were my many selves explaining themselves all at the same time so that I could not make out a single word. My life was a beautiful mystery on the verge of understanding, always on the verge! Think of it!”

— Charles Simic

17. “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.”

— Charles Simic

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

— Charles Simic

19. “The secret wish of poetry is to stop time.”

— Charles Simic

20. “The world is beautiful but not sayable. That’s why we need art.”

— Charles Simic

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

— Charles Simic

22. “Dear Friedrich, the world’s still false, cruel and beautiful...”

— Charles Simic

23. “There are people who live inside their heads and their intellects. It’s something one is born with and stuck with. It’s not something you make a decision about.”

— Charles Simic

24. “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.”

— Charles Simic

25. “Time – the lizard in the sunlight. It doesn’t move, but its eyes are wide open. They love to gaze into our faces and hearken to our discourse. It’s because the very first men were lizards. If you don’t believe me, go grab one by the tail and see it come right off.”

— Charles Simic

26. “The highest levels of consciousness are wordless.”

— Charles Simic

27. “A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights.”

— Charles Simic

28. “We name one thing and then another. That’s how time enters poetry. Space, on the other hand, comes into being through the attention we pay to each word. The more intense our attention, the more space, and there’s a lot of space inside words.”

— Charles Simic

29. “If the sky falls they shall have clouds for supper.”

— Charles Simic

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

— Charles Simic

31. “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.”

— Charles Simic

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

— Charles Simic

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

— Charles Simic

34. “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.”

— Charles Simic

35. “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.”

— Charles Simic

36. “At some point my need for a solution was replaced by the poetry of my continuous failure.”

— Charles Simic

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

— Charles Simic

38. “The truth is dark under your eyelids.”

— Charles Simic

39. “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.”

— Charles Simic

40. “Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator.”

— Charles Simic

41. “Inside is where we meet everyone else; it’s on the outside that we are truly alone.”

— Charles Simic

42. “I’m not a stickler for truth. To me, lying in poetry is much more fun. I’m against lying in life, in principle, in any other activity except poetry.”

— Charles Simic

43. “If the photographers are soul-thieves, whose soul is being stolen in a photograph of the night sky? The soul of the last one to go to bed and the soul of the first one to rise in the morning, perhaps? Photography is a black art like alchemy. It turns matter into spirit and spirit into matter. Still, there are moments when looking at a photograph of a night sky we have a hunch what the word soul means, what the word infinity encompasses.”

— Charles Simic

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

— Charles Simic

45. “To submit to chance is to reveal the self and its obsessions.”

— Charles Simic

46. “Making art in America is about saving one’s soul.”

— Charles Simic

47. “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.”

— Charles Simic

48. “Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.”

— Charles Simic

49. “There’s no preparation for poetry.”

— Charles Simic

50. “A ‘truth’ detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen-and then in bed, of course.”

— Charles Simic