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Top Mark Strand Quotes

Browse top 40 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Mark Strand.

Favorite Mark Strand Quotes

1. "You want to get a good look at yourself. You stand before a mirror, you take off your jacket, unbutton your shirt, open your belt, unzip your fly. The outer clothing falls from you. You take off your shoes and socks, baring your feet. You remove your underwear. At a loss, you examine the mirror. There you are. You are not there." ~ Mark Strand
2. "Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep." ~ Mark Strand
3. "Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure." ~ Mark Strand
4. "For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better." ~ Mark Strand
5. "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
6. "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
7. "Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented." ~ Mark Strand
8. "A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art." ~ Mark Strand
9. "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
10. "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
11. "Each moment is a place you've never been." ~ Mark Strand
12. "From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose." ~ Mark Strand
13. "I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful." ~ Mark Strand
14. "I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me." ~ Mark Strand
15. "I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony." ~ Mark Strand
16. "It's very hard to write humor." ~ Mark Strand
17. "Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb." ~ Mark Strand
18. "Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments." ~ Mark Strand
19. "Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler." ~ Mark Strand
20. "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
21. "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
22. "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
23. "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
24. "Even this late it happens:the coming of love, the coming of light." ~ Mark Strand
25. "Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.There is no happiness like mine.I have been eating poetry." ~ Mark Strand
26. "These wrinkles are nothingThese gray hairs are nothing,This stomach which sagswith old food, these bruisedand swollen ankles, my darkening brain,they are nothing.I am the same boymy mother used to kiss." ~ Mark Strand
27. "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
28. "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
29. "Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imaginedfuture, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love ora passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convincedthat even the smallest particle of the surrounding world wascharged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, andone would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by thehigh, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, somany and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like firefliesin the perfumed heat of summer night." ~ Mark Strand
30. "We are reading the story of our livesAs though we were in itAs though we had written it." ~ Mark Strand
31. "In a fieldI am the absenceof field.This isalways the case.Wherever I amI am what is missing." ~ Mark Strand
32. "We all have reasonsfor moving.I moveto keep things whole." ~ Mark Strand
33. "When I walkI part the airand alwaysthe air moves into fill the spaceswhere my body's been." ~ Mark Strand
34. "...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
35. "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
36. "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
37. "The ultimate self-effacementis not the pretense of the minimal,but the jocular considerations of the maximalin the manner of Wallace Stevens." ~ Mark Strand
38. "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
39. "What I had not realized then, but now know only too well, is that sparks carry within them the wish to be relieved of the burden of brightness. And that is why I no longer write, and why the dark is is my freedom and my happiness." ~ Mark Strand
40. "Lines for WinterTell yourselfas it gets cold and gray falls from the airthat you will go onwalking, hearingthe same tune no matter whereyou find yourself—inside the dome of darkor under the cracking whiteof the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.Tonight as it gets coldtell yourselfwhat you know which is nothingbut the tune your bones playas you keep going. And you will be ablefor once to lie down under the small fireof winter stars.And if it happens that you cannotgo on or turn backand you find yourselfwhere you will be at the end,tell yourselfin that final flowing of cold through your limbsthat you love what you are." ~ Mark Strand

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Today's Quote

I love New York, but I have to admit that I feel very English, and I do miss that sense of history that you have everywhere in Britain."
Author: Charlie Cox

What Did Mark Strand Talk About?

Thin
Poet
Ours
Here
Self
Wit
Bee
Pen
End
Ten
Old
Thou
Low
Hen
Tell
Happen
Son
Ear
Yours
Lie
Sing
Though
Yourself
Use
Ways
Win
Writing
Sin
Side
America
Cannot
Con
Fire
Happens
Less
Moment
Move
Dark
Per
Present
Read
Main
Air

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