Quote

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

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Mother
Rooms
Cannot
Name
Light
Sleep
Sleeps
Doe
Eyes
Enters
Anything
Names
Wishes
Matter
Child
Waking
Children
Eye
Opening
Wish
Room

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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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Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
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When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
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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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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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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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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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Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
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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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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
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I have been eating poetry.
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I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
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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's very hard to write humor.
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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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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
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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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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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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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