Mark Strand Quotes

31 Sourced Quotes

If a man finishes a poem,
he shall bathe in the blank wake of his passion and be kissed by white paper.

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

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

Mark Strand
It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

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

Mark Strand
No voice comes from outer space, from the folds of dust and carpets of wind, to tell us that this is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew how long the ruins would last we would never complain.

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

Mark Strand
Now you invent the boat of your flesh and set it upon the waters and drift in the gradual swell, in the laboring salt. Now you look down. The waters of childhood are there.

Mark Strand
If a man publicly denounces poetry,
His shoes will fill with urine.

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

Mark Strand
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?

Mark Strand
I delay typing as long as possible. When I read a poem in longhand I'm hearing it, when in typescript I'm reading it. A poem can appear finished just because of the cleaness of the typescript.

Mark Strand
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.

Mark Strand
How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

Mark Strand
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.

Mark Strand
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

Mark Strand
From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed. That's all
There was to it.

Mark Strand
Nobody knows you. You are the neighbor of nothing.

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

Mark Strand
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.

Mark Strand
I don't know where it comes from. I think some of it comes from the unconscious. Sometimes it is more complete than other times.

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
Nothing could stop you.
Not the best day. Not the quiet. Not the ocean rocking.
You went on with your dying.

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

Mark Strand
The elements I need to write, a place, a desk, a familiar room. I need some of my books there, I need quiet. zero I'm picturing as I'm writing. I'm putting together what I need to have this thing alive.

Mark Strand
I think a poet's focus is not quite what a prose writer's is, it's not entirely on the world outside. It's fixed on the area where the inside meets the outside, where the poet's sensibility meets the weather, meets the street, meets other people.. that shadow land between self and reality.

Mark Strand
I gaze upon the roast, that is sliced and laid out on my plate and over it I spoon the juices of carrot and onion. And for once I do not regret the passage of time.

Mark Strand
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