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The future is always beginning now.

Mark Strand

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
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More quotes by Mark Strand

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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
Mark Strand
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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.
Mark Strand
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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.
Mark Strand
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...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
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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
Mark Strand
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It's very hard to write humor.
Mark Strand
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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.
Mark Strand
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Poetry is about slowing down. You sit and you read something, you read it again, and it reveals a little bit more, and things come to light you never could have predicted.
Mark Strand
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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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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.
Mark Strand
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Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
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.
Mark Strand
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I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
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Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
Mark Strand
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A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
Mark Strand
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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
Mark Strand
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We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.
Mark Strand
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To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing.
Mark Strand
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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.
Mark Strand
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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