Mark Strand Quotes

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

~ Mark Strand

Even this late it happens:the coming of love, the coming of light.

~ Mark Strand

Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.

~ Mark Strand

In a fieldI am the absenceof field.This isalways the case.Wherever I amI am what is missing.

~ Mark Strand

These wrinkles are nothingThese gray hairs are nothing,This stomach which sagswith old food, these bruisedand swollen ankles, my darkening brain,they are nothing.I am the same boymy mother used to kiss.

~ Mark Strand

When we walk in the sunour shadows are like barges of silence.

~ Mark Strand

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

~ Mark Strand

From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your roomAnd made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking upFrom your book, saw it the moment it landed. That's allThere was to it.

~ Mark Strand

...Then a man turnedAnd said to me: Although I love the past, the dark of it,The weight of it teaching us nothing, the loss of it, the allOf it asking for nothing, I will love the twenty-first century more...

~ Mark Strand

There is no end to what we can learn. The book out thereTells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.

~ Mark Strand

                And into the close and mirrored catacombs of sleepWe'll fall, and there in the faded light discover the bones,The dust, the bitter remains of someone who might have been                    Had we not taken his place.

~ Mark Strand

What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfortOf being strangers, at least to ourselves.

~ Mark Strand

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

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

~ Mark Strand

I is for immortality, which for some poets is a necessary compensation. Presumably miserable in this life, they will be remembered when the rest of us are long forgotten. None of them asks about the quality of that remembrance--what it will be like to crouch in the dim hallways of somebody's mind until the moment of recollection occurs, or to be lifted off suddenly and forever into the pastures of obscurity. Most poets know better than to concern themselves with such things. They know the chances are better than good that their poems will die when they do and never be heard of again, that they'll be replaced by poems sporting a new look in a language more current. They also know that even if individual poems die, though in some cases slowly, poetry will continue: that its subjects, it constant themes, are less liable to change than fashions in language, and that this is where an alternate, less lustrous immortality might be. We all know that a poem can influence other poems, remain alive in them, just as previous poems are alive in it. Could we not say, therefore, that individual poems succeed most by encouraging revisions of themselves and inducing their own erasure? Yes, but is this immortality, or simply a purposeful way of being dead?

~ Mark Strand

Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,And what is invisible stays that way.

~ Mark Strand

There is no happiness like mine.I have been eating poetry.

~ Mark Strand

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

It's very hard to write humor.

~ Mark Strand

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

~ Mark Strand

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

~ Mark Strand

The future is always beginning now.

~ Mark Strand