Mark Strand Quotes

But where are the snows of yester year?

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

Time, you old gypsy man, will you not stay, put up your caravan just for one day?

The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.

The only good thing about the good old days is they're gone.

This is the time to remember cause it will not last forever. These are the days to hold onto cause we won't although we'll want to.

I was looking at the photographs and I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories.

She wanted none of those days to end, and it was always with disappointment that she watched the darkness stride forward.

Don't think about what you've left behind. If what one finds is made of pure matter, it will never spoil. And one can always come back. If what you had found was only a moment of light, like the explosion of a star, you would find nothing on your return.

I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago, and of people who will see a world that I shall never know.

Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

All things are taken from us, and become Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.

I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.

In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.

I long for the time of no more departures. It has something to do with age, probably.

Yesterday's just a memory, tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

We must remember that as the centuries go by, time will pass.

There is no past that we can bring back to us by the longing for it.

Never has the future become so rapidly the past.