Mark Strand Quotes

The future is always beginning now.

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

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

It's very hard to write humor.

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.

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

The HillI have come this far on my own legs,missing the bus, missing taxis,climbing always. One foot in front of the other,that is the way I do it.It does not bother me, the way the hill goes on.Grass beside the road, a tree rattlingits black leaves. So w

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 u

Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our timeIs becoming the architecture of the next time. And the dazzleOf light upon the waters is as nothing beside the changesWrought therein, just as our waywardness meansNothing against the steady pull o

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.

When we walk in the sunour shadows are like barges of silence.

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.

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