Inspirational Quotes, Motivational Sayings, and Wise Words for Daily Inspiration

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A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, poetry permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.

Mark Strand's Popular Quotes

Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.

- 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.

- Mark Strand

These wrinkles are nothing These gray hairs are nothing, This stomach which sags with old food, these bruised and swollen ankles, my darkening brain,…

- Mark Strand

Each moment is a place you've never been.

- Mark Strand

We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.

- 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 in…

- Mark Strand

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…

- Mark Strand

I feel that anything is possible in a poem.

- Mark Strand

The future is always beginning now.

- Mark Strand