Top 40 Mark Strand Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The future is always beginning now.”

— Mark Strand

2. “Each moment is a place you’ve never been.”

— Mark Strand

3. “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

4. “I have been eating poetry.”

— Mark Strand

5. “We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.”

— Mark Strand

6. “We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole.”

— Mark Strand

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

— Mark Strand

8. “In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.”

— Mark Strand

9. “Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.”

— Mark Strand

10. “Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.”

— Mark Strand

11. “When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body’s been.”

— Mark Strand

12. “Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.”

— Mark Strand

13. “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.”

— Mark Strand

14. “I feel that anything is possible in a poem.”

— Mark Strand

15. “We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.”

— Mark Strand

16. “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

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

— Mark Strand

18. “Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.”

— Mark Strand

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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.”

— Mark Strand

22. “From the reader’s view, a poem is more demanding than prose.”

— Mark Strand

23. “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

24. “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

25. “A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.”

— Mark Strand

26. “Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.”

— Mark Strand

27. “I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet’s personality.”

— Mark Strand

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “The reality of a poem is a very ghostly one. It suggests, it suggests, it suggests again.”

— Mark Strand

32. “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

33. “And Robert Lowell, of course – in his poems, we’re not located in his actual life. We’re located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.”

— Mark Strand

34. “The burial of feelings has begun.”

— Mark Strand

35. “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

36. “Poetry is, first and last, language – the rest is filler.”

— Mark Strand

37. “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

38. “I tend to like poems that engage me – that is to say, which do not bore me.”

— Mark Strand

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

— Mark Strand

40. “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

41. “Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.”

— Mark Strand

42. “I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.”

— Mark Strand

43. “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

44. “I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.”

— Mark Strand

45. “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.”

— Mark Strand

46. “It’s very hard to write humor.”

— Mark Strand

47. “Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.”

— Mark Strand

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

— Mark Strand

49. “I would go out under the stars and enter the smallness of being that was mine, and I would disappear into the emptiness within, and it seemed enormous.”

— Mark Strand