Charles Simic Quotes

The sky is falling. No, I'm tipping over backwards.

If you put me in a real Tardis, I dread to think what would happen to the universe.

More and more, I find that the news reads like a particularly random game of Consequences.

I think life would be so much funnier if every day you saw someone walking down the street getting hit in the head by a monkey, don't you?

There are going to be screw-ups, mistakes, confusion, and missteps. One hopes they won’t be fatal.

The Internet is a sketch show.

I love Larry David's take on things in 'Seinfeld', which is that you shouldn't try to help people because it'll always put you into new situations which are unpleasant.

Going to work just looked crazy. Eating another meal, ever, made about as much sense as planting tulip bulbs in the shadow of a falling atom bomb.

What will happen to me, as the oyster said when he very inadvertently swallowed the gooseberry bush, nobody can tell.

No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.

There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the stars themselves begin to die.

The Fomorians skittered backward, away from me, looking justifiably confused. I mean, really, how many human women actually run to them? And I was a human woman covered in swamp yuck, with wild red hair sticking out in matted hunks and arms flailing like a demented Bride of Frankenstein. I'd run from me.

Fools, when their roof-tree falls, think it doomsday.

Catastrophe, riots, factories blowing up, armies in flight, flood - the ear can detect a whole apocalypse in the starry night of the human body.

Personally, I say, "Out of the frying pan and into the deadly pit filled with sharks who are wielding chainsaws with killer kittens stapled to them." However, that one's having a rough time catching on.

There's no theme, no moral to be learned, except for the knowledge that lightning can strike from a clear blue sky one morning and take away everything you've built, everything you've counted on, leaving wreckage and no meaning behind. It can happen to anyone, it can happen to you.

The fuses had been lit and could not be extinguished. All that remained was to observe the speed of the spark, and the size of the explosions.

Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. Therefore, whenever I see a fly settling, in the decisive moment, on the nose of such a person of affairs; or if he is spattered with mud from a carriage which drives past him in still greater haste; or the drawbridge opens up before him; or a tile falls down and knocks him dead, then I laugh heartily.

A screaming comes across the sky.

He reached up t0 grab one and came down with several, and they kept coming, washing over him, floating all around him. Never have tampon strings seemed so beautiful as they rolled up and down with the wind, landing on the ground and then twirling and floating up again, falling and rising and falling and rising.

The tarot card 'The Tower' seemed a chilling reflection of the events of September 11, 2001.

Then there was the time in Hollywood when I sat down in a breakaway chair and it collapsed on me. I was nearly knocked out and might have been even more seriously hurt but my fall was broken by the smog.

The first angel sounded his trumpet, and there came hail and fire mixed with blood, and it was hurled down upon the earth. A third of the earth was burned up, a third of the trees were burned up, and all the green grass was burned up.

Life is good, and there's no reason to think it won't be--right up until the moment when everything explodes into a fireball of tiny, unrecognizable fragments, or it all goes skidding sideways, through the guardrail, over the embankment, and down the mountain. This will happen (and probably more than once).

Do my ears deceive me, or can I actually hear the sounds of worms turning? You say a turning worm makes no sound? But how about a chorus of turning worms?