Quotes by Mark Strand

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

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

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

“In a fieldI am the absenceof field.This isalways the case.Wherever I amI am what is missing.”

“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 ...”

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

“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 ...”

“From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your roomAnd made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking upFrom your book, saw it the m...”

“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.”

“...Then a man turnedAnd said to me: "Although I love the past, the dark of it,The weight of it teaching us nothing, the loss of it, the allOf it asking for nothing, I will love the twenty-first cen...”

“There is no end to what we can learn. The book out thereTells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.”

“ And into the close and mirrored catacombs of sleepWe'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...”

“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 ...”

“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...”

“What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfortOf being strangers, at least to ourselves.”

“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...”

“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 th...”

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

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

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