Mark Strand Quotes

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

We bury love; Forgetfulness grows over it like grass: That is a thing to weep for, not the dead.

It was hard to remember what the yard had looked like even twelve hours before, undisturbed and pristine. Like it takes so little to change something, but to make you forget the way it once was, as well.

But where are the snows of yester year?

Time, memory, loss and love are my main artistic concerns, but time, among all of them, becomes the determinant.

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.

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")

Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting: So were it with me if forgetting could be willed. Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring, Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.

They would grow old. They would forget me.

The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.

And so there would always be more to remember that could no longer be seen...our history is always returning to a little patch of weeds and saplings with an old chimney sticking up by itself...and here I look ahead to the resting of my case: I love the house that belonged to the chimney, holding it bright in memory, and love the saplings and the weeds.

There is no remembrance which time does not obliterate, nor pain which death does not terminate.

as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.

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

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

The results would have stayed on the watch face until the batteries died. But trying to make time stand still this way would have been a mistake. It is just as important to erase times eventually as to save them at first.

And we forget because we must and not because we will.

Total oblivion is the fate of almost everything in this world. I'm very likely to suffer that same fate; my work will probably not be remembered, and if any of it is, if any of those novels is fated to be one of those novels that is still being read 50 or 100 years after it was written, I've probably already written it.

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

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.