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.

— Mark Strand

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

— Mark Strand

Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.

— Mark Strand

The future is always beginning now.

— Mark Strand

The Hill have come this far on my own legs, missing the bus, missing taxis, climbing always. One foot in front of the other, that is the way I do it. It does not bother me, the way the hill goes on. Grass beside the road, a tree rattling its black leaves. So what? The longer I walk, the farther I am from everything. One foot in front of the other. The hours pass. One foot in front of the other. The years pass. The colors of arrival fade. That is the way I do it.

— Mark Strand

... Then a man turned And said to me: "Although I love the past, the dark of it, The weight of it teaching us nothing, the loss of it, the allow it asking for nothing, I will love the twenty-first century more...

— Mark Strand

There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.

— Mark Strand

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

— 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, they are nothing. I am the same boy my mother used to kiss.

— Mark Strand

Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imagined future, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love Ora 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, anyone 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, Romany and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like fireflies in the perfumed heat of summer night.

— Mark Strand