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Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.

Mark Strand

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Describing
Nothingness
Start
Ends

More quotes by Mark Strand

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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?
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I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
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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 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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I have been eating poetry.
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Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
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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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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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When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
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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.
Mark Strand
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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
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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.
Mark Strand
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The future is always beginning now.
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To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing.
Mark Strand
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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.
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...In another time, What cannot be seen will define us, and we shall be prompted To say that language is error, and all things are wronged By representation. The self, we shall say, can never be Seen with a disguise, and never be seen without one.
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Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
Mark Strand
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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
Mark Strand
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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
Mark Strand
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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.
Mark Strand