Top 10 Quotes & Sayings by Louis Simpson

Being shelled is the main work of an infantry soldier, which no one talks about. Everyone has his own way of going about it. In general, it means lying face down and contracting your body into as small a space as possible.

It's complicated, being an American, Having the money and the bad conscience, both at the same time.

The treasures of Cathay were never found. In this America, this wilderness Where the axe echoes with a lonely sound, The generations labor to possess And grave by grave we civilize the ground.

All that grave weight of America Cancelled! Like Greece and Rome. The future in ruins!

The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it.

I gave no prescriptions, And those who have taken my moods for prophecies Mistake the matter.

Paranoia imposes its own vision on the external world; it differs from other kinds of visionary experience in that the paranoid wants others to share his view—even insists on it. Paranoia is very like poetic creativity. This accounts for my fascination with certain people in whom this state of mind was evident: ‘characters’ met by chance, whose words and gestures would haunt me for years until, finally, in a poem I was able to dispel them.

The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.

In my grandmother's house there was always chicken soup And talk of the old country--mud and boards, Poverty, The snow falling down and necks of lovers.

For people may not know what they think about politics in the Balkans, or the vexed question of men and women, but everyone has a definite opinion about the flavour of shredded coconut.