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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.

Mark Strand

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
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Poet
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Writer
Writing
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Misrepresent
Autobiographical
Dishonest
Point
Stuff
Certain

More quotes by 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.
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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
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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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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
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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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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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We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.
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The future is always beginning now.
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Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
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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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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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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.
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Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
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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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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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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.
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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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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
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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