Mark Strand Quotes

55 quotes in 730 categories

• The future is always beginning now.
• 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…
• 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…
• Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.
• Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
• I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself…
• The reality of a poem is a very ghostly one. It suggests, it suggests, it suggests again.
• 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…
• From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
• And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic…
• I feel that anything is possible in a poem.
• The burial of feelings has begun.
• I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.
• Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
• 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.
• Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
• It's very hard to write humor.
• 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…
• 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…
• For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better.

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