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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.

Charles Simic

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Charles Simic
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: May 9
Anglicist
Essayist
Journalist
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Belgrade
Serbia
Dušan Simić
Čarls Simić
Language
Criticism
Experience
Allow
Play
Streets
Children
Parents
Parent
Remind
Middle
Divorce
Effort
Critics
Class
Street

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A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights.
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Silence is the only language god speaks.
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The truth is dark under your eyelids.
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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.
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Making art in America is about saving one's soul.
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Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all others were making ships.
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Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades (mass-produced items promoted into art objects, such as Duchamp's Fountain-urinal as sculpture) abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen.
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Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.
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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.
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Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator.
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The highest levels of consciousness are wordless.
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The world is beautiful but not sayable. That's why we need art.
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Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with posters advertising faraway places.
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I slept little, read a lot, and fell in love frequently.
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He who cannot howl will not find his pack.
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There’s no preparation for poetry.
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The poem I want to write is impossible. A stone that floats.
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If the sky falls they shall have clouds for supper.
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Here is something we can all count on. Sooner or later our tribe always comes to ask us to agree to murder.
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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.
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