96 Quotes by Mark Strand

You don’t read a poem to find the meaning of life. The opposite. I mean, you’d be foolish to. Now, some American poets present the reader with a slice of life, saying, I went to the store today, and I saw a man, and he looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both knew we were … thieves. And aren’t we all thieves? You know, this is extracting from everyday experience a statement about life, or a moral.

I want bad girls to win.

En un campo yo soy la ausencia del campo

Each moment is a place you've never been.

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

But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving.

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.

For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better.

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