Mark Strand Short Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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