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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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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
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Writer
Word
Nothing
Suspected
Dictionary
Discover
Beyond
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More quotes by 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.
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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
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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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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 certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.
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It's very hard to write humor.
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A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
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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. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.
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Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
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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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The future is always beginning now.
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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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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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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.
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Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
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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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I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
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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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