Mark Strand Quotes

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• The future is always beginning now.

  Mark Strand

  Love, Marriage, Letting Go

  Mark Strand (2014). “Collected Poems”, p.62, 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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• 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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• 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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• Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.

  Mark Strand

  Ends, Describing, Nothingness

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.

  Mark Strand

  Fate, Destiny, Dumb

  Mark Strand (2014). “Collected Poems”, p.208, Knopf

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• I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.

  Mark Strand

  Thinking, Personality, Triumph

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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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• Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imagined future, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love or a passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convinced that even the smallest particle of the surrounding world was charged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, and one would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind- loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by the high, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, so many and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like fireflies in the perfumed heat of summer night.

  Mark Strand

  Summer, Strong, Passion

  Mark Strand (2014). “Collected Poems”, p.406, Knopf

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• And what does it matter when light enters the room where a child sleeps and the waking mother, opening her eyes, wishes more than anything to be unwakened by what she cannot name?

  Mark Strand

  Mother, Children, Sleep

  Mark Strand (2014). “Collected Poems”, p.434, Knopf

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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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• The reality of a poem is a very ghostly one. It suggests, it suggests, it suggests again.

  Mark Strand

  Reality

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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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