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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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Future
Always
Love

More quotes by Mark Strand

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Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
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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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I have been eating poetry.
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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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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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It's very hard to write humor.
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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.
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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.
Mark Strand
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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Mark Strand
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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.
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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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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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Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
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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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We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.
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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
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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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When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
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