Mark Strand Quotes

Tell me, you people out there, what is poetry anyway?
Can anyone die without even a little? — Mark Strand

Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention. — Mark Strand

To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing. — Mark Strand

Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness. — Mark Strand

This is the mirror
in which pain is asleep
this is the country
nobody visits — Mark Strand

I haven't met God and I haven't been to heaven, so I'm skeptical, — Mark Strand

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

We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole. — Mark Strand

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

I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful. — Mark Strand

Time tells me what I am.
I change and I am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains. — Mark Strand

Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb. — Mark Strand

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art. — Mark Strand

But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving. — Mark Strand

And yet Nothing here is certain; — Mark Strand

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments. — Mark Strand

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing. — Mark Strand

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

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose. — Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry. — Mark Strand

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure. — Mark Strand

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

The future is always beginning now. — Mark Strand

When we walk in the sun
our shadows are like barges of silence. — Mark Strand

We are reading the story of our lives
As though we were in it
As though we had written it. — Mark Strand

I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony. — Mark Strand

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been. — Mark Strand

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions. — Mark Strand

Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light. — Mark Strand

For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better. — Mark Strand

What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort
Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. — Mark Strand

I grow into my death.
My life is small
and getting smaller. The world is green.
Nothing is all. — Mark Strand

The reality of a poem is a very ghostly one. It suggests, it suggests, it suggests again. — Mark Strand

Each moment is a place
you've never been. — Mark Strand

I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me. — Mark Strand

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented. — Mark Strand

There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there
Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind. — Mark Strand

I feel that anything is possible in a poem. — Mark Strand

Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,
And what is invisible stays that way. — Mark Strand

Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep. — Mark Strand

Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our time
Is becoming the architecture of the next time. — Mark Strand

It's very hard to write humor. — Mark Strand

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