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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.
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
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
I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
Mark Strand
A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
Mark Strand
Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
Mark Strand
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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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.
Mark Strand
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
Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
Mark Strand
Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
Mark Strand
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
I have been eating poetry.
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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Mark Strand
It's very hard to write humor.
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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
Mark Strand
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
We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.
Mark Strand
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
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
When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
Mark Strand
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
