Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Simic

Simic’s line is a small manifesto disguised as a sigh: poetry begins not in language but in its failure. Calling it “an orphan of silence” makes the poem a child separated from its origin. Silence is the lost parent - the pre-verbal, bodily, half-formed reality we actually live in - and the poem grows up trying to remember where it came from. That metaphor also carries Simic’s signature dark tenderness: an orphan isn’t noble; it’s vulnerable, a little suspicious of comfort, forced to improvise a home from scraps.

“The words never quite equal the experience behind them” refuses the Romantic fantasy that lyric speech can perfectly transmute life into art. Simic isn’t being coyly mystical; he’s describing the everyday gap between sensation and statement: the smell that triggers a childhood you can’t fully reconstruct, the terror you can name only after it has passed, the love that becomes thinner the moment it’s narrated. The subtext is both humbling and liberating. If words can’t “equal” experience, the poet’s job isn’t to win some contest of accuracy; it’s to make the mismatch felt, to turn inadequacy into music, tension, and meaning.

Context matters here: Simic, an immigrant shaped by wartime Yugoslavia and later American plainspokenness, writes from a life where what’s unsaid can be more truthful than what’s declared. His surreal minimalism often looks like simplicity, but it’s really an ethics of restraint: don’t overclaim. Let silence remain in the poem as a kind of proof.