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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

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Mine
Eating
Poetry
Ink
Happiness
Runs
Running
Corners
Like
Mouth
Mouths
Mines

More quotes by Mark Strand

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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
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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.
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Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
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I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.
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Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
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When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
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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.
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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
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To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing.
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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?
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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.
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We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.
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Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
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It came to my house. It sat on my shoulders. Your shadow is yours. I told it so. I said it was yours. I have carried it with me too long. I give it back.
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In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.
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There's a certain point, when you're writing autobiographical stuff, where you don't want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest.
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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.
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It's very hard to write humor.
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The future is always beginning now.
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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.
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