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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
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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
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Writer
Happens
Knew
Carpet
Long
Happen
Outer
Way
Space
Complain
Never
Lasts
Ruins
Would
Last
Complaining
Voice
Dust
Comes
Meant
Carpets
Tell
Wind
Folds
More quotes by Mark Strand
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 imposes.
Mark Strand
The future is always beginning now.
Mark Strand
...In another time, What cannot be seen will define us, and we shall be prompted To say that language is error, and all things are wronged By representation. The self, we shall say, can never be Seen with a disguise, and never be seen without one.
Mark Strand
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
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
Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
Mark Strand
A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
Mark Strand
I don't really think it will make much difference to me when I'm dead whether I'm read or not . . . just as whether I'm dead or not won't mean much to me when I'm dead.
Mark Strand
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
Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
Mark Strand
There's a certain point, when you're writing autobiographical stuff, where you don't want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest.
Mark Strand
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
Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
Mark Strand
Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Mark Strand
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
We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.
Mark Strand
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
To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing.
Mark Strand
And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.
Mark Strand
When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
Mark Strand
