Charles Simic Quotes

Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn't tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn't fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds of time, like a reflection in a fun house mirror.

Give me a mystery - just a plain and simple one - a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little bare-foot mystery: give me a mystery - just one!

Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore.

It is little enough we know and the rest is darkness.

The more mysterious, the more imperfect: that which is mystically spoken is but half spoken.

Beginnings are apt to be shadowy.

Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.

Would not it be best to leave room to mystery?

Mystery magnifies danger as the fog the sun.

Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divinings, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.

Silence is like nightfall. Objects are lost in it insensibly.

There's some mysterious process at work here, which I don't even want to understand.

From this point forth, we shall be leaving the firm foundation of fact and journeying together through the murky marshes of memory into thickets of wildest guesswork.

As there was never any question there was never any answer.

Who can really distinguish between the sea and what's reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?

Nothing is black or white.

Commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still.

There’s no accounting for the mysteries of the human heart

Prayer is like a secret garden made up of silence and rest and inwardness. But there are a thousand and one doors into this garden and we all have to find our own.

Things are really weird around here, and most of us don't know everything. Half of everything.

The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.

A lack of communication leaves fear and doubt.

So when people ask me if there's another one, I say, "You know, I don't think so, but I don't know, and I kind of don't understand why."