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1 " A true confession: I believe in a soluble fish. "
― Charles Simic , The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs
2 " One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other. "
3 " Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley. "
― Charles Simic , Dime-Store Alchemy
4 " 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. "
5 " Poetry is an orphan of silence. "
― Charles Simic
6 " Like many others, I grew up in an age that preached liberty and built slave camps. "
― Charles Simic , The Monster Loves His Labyrinth
7 " The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination. "
8 " The idea is to spin the wheel of metaphors and images until sparks of associations begin to fly for the reader. "
9 " Memory, all-night's bedside tattoo artist. "
― Charles Simic , Jackstraws
10 " For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas. "
11 " 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 friend’s idea of metaphysics, although his brother ran away with his wife. He still bought her a rose every day, sat in the empty house for the next twenty years talking to her about the weather. 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! My friend’s empty house with every one of its windows lit. The dark trees multiplying all around it. "
― Charles Simic , The World Doesn't End
12 " Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with posters advertising faraway places. "
13 " If the sky falls they shall have clouds for supper. "
14 " Silence is the only language god speaks. "
15 " 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! "
16 " Making art in America is about saving one's soul. "
17 " When you play chess alone it's always your move. "
18 " To submit to chance is to reveal the self and its obsessions. "
19 " It is the desire for irreverence as much as anything else that brought me first to poetry. The need to make fun of authority, break taboos, celebrate the body and its functions, claim that one has seen angels in the same breath as one says that there is no god. "
20 " 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 , The Life of Images: Selected Prose
