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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
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Giving
Surrender
Real
Meat
Kind
Patience
Demand
Poet
Food
Give
Loaf
Must
Poems

More quotes by Mark Strand

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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
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In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.
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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.
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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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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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Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
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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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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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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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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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The future is always beginning now.
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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.
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Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
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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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
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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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Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
Mark Strand