Quotes from Mark Strand

It came to my house. It sat on my shoulders. Your shadow is yours. I told it so. I said it was yours. I have carried it with me too long. I give it back.

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.

In another time, What cannot be seen will define us, and we shall be prompted To say that language is error, and all things are wronged By representation. The self, we shall say, can never be Seen with a disguise, and never be seen without one.

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.

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

Each moment is a place you've never been.

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

A cloud is never a mirror -Words about clouds are clouds themselves -If snow falls inside a cloud, only the cloud knows -A cloud dreams only of triangles -Clouds are in love with horizons -The cloud that was gone would never come back -Every lake desires a cloud -A cloud is a cathedral without belief -Clouds cannot see what we do under the umbrella -Clouds are thoughts without words

What I had not realized then, but now know only too well, is that sparks carry within them the wish to be relieved of the burden of brightness. And that is why I no longer write, and why the dark is is my freedom and my happiness.

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")

There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.