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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
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Humor
Write
Hard
Writing

More quotes by Mark Strand

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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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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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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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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
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
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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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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.
Mark Strand
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A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
Mark Strand
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The future is always beginning now.
Mark Strand
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Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
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Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
Mark Strand
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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.
Mark Strand
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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.
Mark Strand
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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.
Mark Strand
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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.
Mark Strand
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We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.
Mark Strand
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When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
Mark Strand
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Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
Mark Strand
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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.
Mark Strand
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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