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Mark Strand Quotes | Quotes said by Mark Strand

  • Mark Strand Quote #1

    And into the close and mirrored catacombs of sleep
    We'll fall, and there in the faded light discover the bones,
    The dust, the bitter remains of someone who might have been
    Had we not taken his place.


  • Mark Strand Quote #2

    ...Then a man turned
    And said to me: Although I love the past, the dark of it,
    The weight of it teaching us nothing, the loss of it, the all
    Of it asking for nothing, I will love the twenty-first century more...

  • Mark Strand Quote #3

    Lines for Winter

    Tell yourself
    as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
    that you will go on
    walking, hearing
    the same tune no matter where
    you find yourself—
    inside the dome of dark
    or under the cracking white
    of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
    Tonight as it gets cold
    tell yourself
    what you know which is nothing
    but the tune your bones play
    as you keep going. And you will be able
    for once to lie down under the small fire
    of winter stars.
    And if it happens that you cannot
    go on or turn back
    and you find yourself
    where you will be at the end,
    tell yourself
    in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
    that you love what you are.

  • Mark Strand Quote #4

    My Name

    Once when the lawn was a golden green
    and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
    in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
    with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
    feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
    what I would become and where I would find myself,
    and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
    that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
    my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
    one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
    as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
    from which it had come and to which it would go.

  • Mark Strand Quote #5

    The Coming of Light

    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 Quote #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 Quote #7

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

  • Mark Strand Quote #8

    A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.

  • Mark Strand Quote #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 Quote #10

    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 Quote #11

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

  • Mark Strand Quote #12

    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 Quote #13

    I is for immortality, which for some poets is a necessary compensation. Presumably miserable in this life, they will be remembered when the rest of us are long forgotten. None of them asks about the quality of that remembrance--what it will be like to crouch in the dim hallways of somebody's mind until the moment of recollection occurs, or to be lifted off suddenly and forever into the pastures of obscurity. Most poets know better than to concern themselves with such things. They know the chances are better than good that their poems will die when they do and never be heard of again, that they'll be replaced by poems sporting a new look in a language more current. They also know that even if individual poems die, though in some cases slowly, poetry will continue: that its subjects, it constant themes, are less liable to change than fashions in language, and that this is where an alternate, less lustrous immortality might be. We all know that a poem can influence other poems, remain alive in them, just as previous poems are alive in it. Could we not say, therefore, that individual poems succeed most by encouraging revisions of themselves and inducing their own erasure? Yes, but is this immortality, or simply a purposeful way of being dead?

  • Mark Strand Quote #14

    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 Quote #15

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

  • Mark Strand Quote #16

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

  • Mark Strand Quote #17

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

  • Mark Strand Quote #18

    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 Quote #19

    It's very hard to write humor.

  • Mark Strand Quote #20

    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 Quote #21

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

  • Mark Strand Quote #22

    Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our time
    Is becoming the architecture of the next time. And the dazzle

    Of light upon the waters is as nothing beside the changes
    Wrought therein, just as our waywardness means

    Nothing against the steady pull of things over the edge.
    Nobody can stop the flow, but nobody can start it either.

    Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,
    And what is invisible stays that way. Desire has fled,

    Leaving only a trace of perfume in its wake,
    And so many people we loved have gone,

    And 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 Quote #23

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

  • Mark Strand Quote #24

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

  • Mark Strand Quote #25

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

  • Mark Strand Quote #26

    The future is always beginning now.

  • Mark Strand Quote #27

    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 Quote #28

    There is no happiness like mine.
    I have been eating poetry.

  • Mark Strand Quote #29

    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 Quote #30

    Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imagined
    future, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love or
    a passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convinced
    that even the smallest particle of the surrounding world was
    charged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, and
    one would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-
    loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by the
    high, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, so
    many and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like fireflies
    in the perfumed heat of summer night.

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