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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.

Mark Strand

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Told
Came
House
Give
Back
Sat
Giving
Carried
Long
Shoulders
Shadow

More quotes by Mark Strand

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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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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
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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 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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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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Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
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When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
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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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Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
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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 part the air and always the air moves in to fill the space where my body has been. We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole.
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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
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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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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.
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I have been eating poetry.
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Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
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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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Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
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A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
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Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
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