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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.

Mark Strand

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Brain
Wrinkles
Mother
Stomach
Used
Gray
Nothing
Kiss
Darkening
Kissing
Hairs
Hair
Swollen
Boys
Ankles
Food
Bruised

More quotes by Mark Strand

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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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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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Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
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A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.
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Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
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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.
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I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
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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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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
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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.
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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
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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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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.
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Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
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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.
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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.
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I have been eating poetry.
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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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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
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Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
Mark Strand