96 Quotes by Mark Strand

If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we'd live in a much more humane and decent world.

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

It's very hard to write humor.

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

Poems not only demand patience, they demand a kind of surrender. You must give yourself up to them. This is the real food for a poet: other poems, not meat loaf.

Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.

Poetry is about slowing down. You sit and you read something, you read it again, and it reveals a little bit more, and things come to light you never could have predicted.

To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing.

I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical,