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I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.

Mark Strand

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
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Writer
Skeptical
Mets
Havens
Haven
Heaven

More quotes by Mark Strand

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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
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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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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
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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.
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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
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Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
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The future is always beginning now.
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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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When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
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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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I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
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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.
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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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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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It's very hard to write humor.
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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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...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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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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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