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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

Mark Strand

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
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Poetry

More quotes by Mark Strand

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It's very hard to write humor.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
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I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
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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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The future is always beginning now.
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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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Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
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Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
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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.
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To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing.
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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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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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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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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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Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
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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.
Mark Strand