Mark Strand Quotes

When I'm dead are they going to remember me ? I don't really think about it, it's up to them. When I'm dead, who cares ? I don't.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

I could still be forgotten when I'm dead. I don't really care what happens when I'm dead.

I shall not altogether die.

What do people fear most about death? I asked the reb. "Fear?" he thought for a moment. 'Well, for one thing, what happens next? Where do we go? Is it what we imagined?" That's big. "Yes. But there's something else." What else? He leaned forward. "Being forgotten," he whispered.

We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing.

When people ask me that, I say I don't want to be remembered. It means I'm no longer around.

Once you're dead, you're made for life.

I suppose that every one of us hopes secretly for immortality; to leave, I mean, a name behind him which will live forever in this world, whatever he may be doing, himself, in the next.

When the 'Guardian' is commissioning writers to write obituary pieces about you and your career... it doesn't get much nastier than that. And you've just got to go, 'It doesn't actually matter.'

I don't want to achieve immortality by being inducted into the Hall of Fame. I want to achieve immortality by not dying.

Of present fame think little, and of future less; the praises that we receive after we are buried, like the flowers that are strewed over our grave, may be gratifying to the living, but they are nothing to the dead.

The first requisite for immortality is death.

It's funny the way most people love the dead. Once you are dead, you are made for life.

When Time is spent, Eternity begins.

If fame is to come only after death, I am in no hurry for it.

Biography is one of the new terrors of death.

I've had a wonderful life. What people are going to write about me 10 years after I'm dead - who cares?

I don't care much whether people remember me or not. If people remember, well and good. If they don't remember, it's alright - I'm dead anyway.

I am not concerned about my posthumous fame. Monuments are no good to the dead.

Everyone dies, and I am not, you know, I don't believe in the Homeric idea that, you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state.

I wish I can meet my wife in the hereafter, but I don't think I will. I just cease to exist just as she has ceased to exist.

I think Willa Cather did a short story called "Paul's Case," and in it, when he finally commits suicide, it says, "He surrendered to the black design of things." And that's what I anticipate death will be: a totally unconscious void in which you float through eternity with no particular consciousness of anything. I think once around is enough. I don't want to start it all over again.