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It's very hard to write humor.
Mark Strand
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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
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Writing
Humor
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Hard
More quotes by Mark Strand
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
In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.
Mark Strand
Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
Mark Strand
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
Mark Strand
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
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
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
I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
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
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
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.
Mark Strand
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
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.
Mark Strand
To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing.
Mark Strand
Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
Mark Strand
We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.
Mark Strand
Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Mark Strand
And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.
Mark Strand
