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Mark Strand

Mark Strand Quotes

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Famous Mark Strand Quotes

“XVI It is true, as someone has said, that in A world without heaven all is farewell. Whether you wave your hand or not, It is farewell, and if no tears come to your eyes It is still farewell, and if you pretend not to notice, Hating what passes, it is still farewell. Farewell no matter what. And the palms as they lean Over the green, bright lagoon, and the pelicans Diving, and the glistening bodies of bathers resting, Are stages in an ultimate stillness, and the movement Of sand, and of wind, and the secret moves of the body Are part of the same, a simplicity that turns being Into an occasion for mourning, or into an occasion Worth celebrating, for what else does one do, Feeling the weight of the pelicans' wings, The density of the palms' shadows, the cells that darken The backs of bathers? These are beyond the distortions Of change, beyond the evasions of music. The end Is enacted again and again. And we feel it In the temptations of sleep, in the moon's ripening, In the wine as it waits in the glass.”

EndsJoyGriefMourningMortalityCelebrationWallace Stevens
Book:Dark Harbor. A Poem
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“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.”

SelfPoetry
Book:Man and Camel
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“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")”

LongHas BeensEndsSeemsMightPastFireShadowSeasonsWeatherBurnedLong AgoSeagullWithout A Trace
Book:Collected Poems
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“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.”

WorldLooksLongStillsMomentsPurposeNightPassionStrongGivenFeltHoursForeverImpossibleTreeWindPromiseSummerSingingBirdRiversGoldDown AndConvincedHeatStreamsLook UpPaleLong AgoSmallestParticlesGrandeurAlteredCarried AwayFireflySummer NightsFoliageBasking
Book:Collected Poems
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