Mark Strand Quotes

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

You're thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can't tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit." "Perhaps it hasn't one," Alice ventured to remark. "Tut, tut, child!" said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.

They only babble who practise not reflection.

All confessions are Odysseys.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.

I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores.

Night is the mother of thoughts.

The principle of art is to pause, not bypass.

'Swan,' by Mary Oliver. Poems and prose. Reading from this book is as if visiting a very wise friend. There is wisdom and welcoming kindness on every page.

In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.

Night is the mother of counsels.

Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.

In this world, where everything happens so fast, it's hard to sit back, take the time and contemplate.

Never be afraid to sit a while and think.

To contemplate is to look at shadows.

The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil.

I don't really take a step back too often to see what's going on.

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

I'm a thinker.

Music has always taken me to my 'thinking place' - the one place that makes me dwell on the meaning of things and ponder why things are the way they are.

One does not see his thought distinctly till it is reflected in the image of another's.

If you sit on the doorstep long enough, I daresay you will think of something

There are a lot of memories we imagine. We play them over and over in our minds, trying to orchestrate our movements and words to perfection. Or maybe it's just that I've lived inside of my head more than any other person in the history of the world. Maybe none of us can really predict how we will act at any give moment. Maybe we're all at the mercy of circumstance in spite of our well-laid plans.

Most persons who indulge in second thought don't do much thinking when the subject is presented for first thought.

We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of things....but, there are times when we must stop. We sit still. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or in its memory. We listen, and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.