Mark Strand Quotes

Quotes about:

Language Poetry Writing

The future is always beginning now.

Mark Strand

Love, Marriage, Letting Go

Mark Strand (2014). “Collected Poems”, p.62, Knopf

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Each moment is a place you've never been.

Mark Strand

Time, Stress, Fresh Start

Mark Strand (2014). “Collected Poems”, p.104, Knopf

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We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.

Mark Strand

Life, Thinking, Pay

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Even this late it happens the coming of love, the coming of light. You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves, stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows, sending up warm bouquets of air. Even this late the bones of the body shine and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.

Mark Strand

Dream, Stars, Air

Mark Strand (2014). “Collected Poems”, p.166, Knopf

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If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we'd live in a much more humane and decent world.

Mark Strand

Reading, Government, World

Inscape Journal Interview, inscape.byu.edu.

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These wrinkles are nothing These gray hairs are nothing, This stomach which sags with old food, these bruised and swollen ankles, my darkening brain, they are nothing. I am the same boy my mother used to kiss.

Mark Strand

Mother, Kissing, Boys

Mark Strand (2014). “Collected Poems”, p.122, Knopf

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Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.

Mark Strand

Ends, Describing, Nothingness

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A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, poetry permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.

Mark Strand

Busy, Imagine, Permit

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Poetry is about slowing down. You sit and you read something, you read it again, and it reveals a little bit more, and things come to light you never could have predicted.

Mark Strand

Light, Littles, Slow Down

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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

Mark Strand

Pain, Poetry, Pleasure

"In The Presence Of America: A Conversation With Mark Strand". Interview with Katharine Coles, weberstudies.weber.edu. 1992.

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Poems not only demand patience, they demand a kind of surrender. You must give yourself up to them. This is the real food for a poet: other poems, not meat loaf.

Mark Strand

Real, Giving, Meat

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I feel that anything is possible in a poem.

Mark Strand

Poetry, Feels, Anything Is Possible

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We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.

Mark Strand

Reading, Stories, Our Lives

Mark Strand (2014). “Collected Poems”, p.145, Knopf

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When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body's been.

Mark Strand

Moving, Space, Air

Mark Strand (2014). “Collected Poems”, p.79, Knopf

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A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

Mark Strand

Art, Life Is, Made

"In the Presence of America: A Conversation with Mark Strand". Interview with Katharine Coles, weberstudies.weber.edu. 1992.

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She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn't. There was a house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain. When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything.

Mark Strand

Years, Afterlife, House

Mark Strand (2012). “Almost Invisible: Poems”, p.38, Knopf

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In a field I am the absence of field.That is always the case. Wherever I am, I am what is missing. When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the space where my body has been. We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole.

Mark Strand

Moving, Garden, Air

"Keeping Things Whole" l. 14 (1969)

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The burial of feelings has begun.

Mark Strand

Feelings, Burial

Mark Strand (2007). “New Selected Poems”, Knopf

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Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.

Mark Strand

Writing, Attention, Prove

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For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better.

Mark Strand

Way, Said

Mark Strand (2000). “The Weather of Words: Poetic Invention”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated

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And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.

Mark Strand

Lying, Imagination, Want

Interview with Katharine Coles, weberstudies.weber.edu. 1992.

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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

Mark Strand

Lasts, Firsts, Language

"In the Presence of America: A Conversation with Mark Strand". Interview with Katharine Coles, weberstudies.weber.edu. 1992.

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I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.

Mark Strand

Heaven, Mets, Skeptical

"Mark Strand, former US poet laureate, dies aged 80". www.theguardian.com. November 29, 2014.

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Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.

Mark Strand

Running, Poetry, Ink

"Eating Poetry" l. 1 (1980)

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No voice comes from outer space, from the folds of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew how long the ruins would last we would never complain.

Mark Strand

Space, Dust, Wind

Mark Strand (2014). “Collected Poems”, p.334, Knopf

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Mark Strand

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Born: April 11, 1934
Died: November 29, 2014
Occupation: Poet
Cite this Page: Citation

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