Charles Simic Quotes

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.

Memory, all-night's bedside tattoo artist.

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

Poetry is an orphan of silence.

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

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