Quote

The future is always beginning now.

Mark Strand

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Marriage
Future
Always
Love
Beginning
Couple

More quotes by Mark Strand

Image
Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Mark Strand
Image
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
Image
She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn't. There was a house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain. When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything.
Mark Strand
Image
To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing.
Mark Strand
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
Mark Strand
Image
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
Image
Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
Mark Strand
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
Mark Strand
Image
I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
Mark Strand
Image
Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
Mark Strand
Image
Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
Mark Strand
Image
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
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.
Mark Strand
Image
It's very hard to write humor.
Mark Strand
Image
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
Image
I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand