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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.

Mark Strand

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
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More quotes by Mark Strand

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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
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I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
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Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
Mark Strand
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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.
Mark Strand
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She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn't. There was a house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain. When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything.
Mark Strand
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The future is always beginning now.
Mark Strand
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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.
Mark Strand
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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
Mark Strand
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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
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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Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
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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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.
Mark Strand
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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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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
Mark Strand
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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
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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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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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