Quotes by Mark Strand

About Mark Strand:

Mark Strand was a Canadian-born American poet, essayist and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990 and received the Wallace Stevens Award in 2004. Strand was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University from 2005 until his death in 2014.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Mark Strand

                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 pla...

Mark Strand

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

...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

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

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

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

Mark Strand

What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort Of being strangers, at least to ourselves.

Mark Strand

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

Mark Strand

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...

Mark Strand

When you go, if you go, And I should want to die, there's nothing I'd be saved by more than the time you fell asleep in my arms in a trust so gentle I let the darkening room drink up the evening, till rest, or the new rain lightly roused you awake. I...

Mark Strand

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

Mark Strand

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 tom...

Mark Strand

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, an...

Mark Strand

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

Each moment is a place you've never been.

Mark Strand

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

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

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

Mark Strand

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

Author Bio

  • NameMark Strand
  • DescriptionCanadian-American poet, essayist, translator
  • BornApril 11, 1934
  • DiedNovember 29, 2014
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPoet; Writer; Translator
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; MacArthur Fellows Program; Rome Prize; Bollingen Prize; Pulitzer Prize For Poetry