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Time & Perspective Quote by Mark Strand

"Each moment is a place you've never been"

About this Quote

Time, in Mark Strand's hands, stops being a neutral river and turns into strange geography. "Each moment is a place you've never been" works because it refuses the comforting metaphor of time as something we travel through knowingly. Strand flips it: the present isn't a point on a line, it's a location with its own weather, its own rules, its own disorientation. The line has the cool clarity of an epigram, but its real effect is destabilizing. If every moment is genuinely new territory, then habit becomes a form of self-deception. You can't rely on yesterday's map.

The intent feels characteristically Strand: to make the ordinary uncanny, to press anxiety into a clean sentence. The subtext is both exhilarating and bleak. Exhilarating, because it suggests a perpetual possibility - the world isn't used up, not even by your own life. Bleak, because novelty here isn't choice; it's fate. You are constantly arriving somewhere unprepared, even in your own mind. There's a quiet rebuttal to the fantasy of mastery - the idea that experience accumulates into control. Strand implies the opposite: experience accumulates into the knowledge that control is an illusion.

Context matters. Strand's work often circles absence, the slipperiness of self, the way consciousness keeps losing its grip on what it thinks it possesses. This line sits comfortably in late-20th-century American poetry's preoccupation with alienation and inner surveillance, but it also reads like a coping mechanism: if you treat the present as uncharted land, you stop demanding that life feel familiar. You start paying attention instead.

Quote Details

TopicLive in the Moment
Source
Later attribution: The Laugh-a-Day Book of Bloopers, Quotes & Good Clean Jokes (Jim Kraus, 2012) modern compilationISBN: 9780800720865 · ID: MkgtK1iB3AMC
Text match: 95.00%   Provider: Google Books
Evidence:
... mark their golden wedding anniversary . “ Let's have a party , Homer , ” she suggested . “ Let's kill a pig ... Each moment is a place you've never been . — Mark Strand • Day • Grandpa was celebrating his one hundredth birthday ...
Cite

Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Strand, Mark. (2026, March 23). Each moment is a place you've never been. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/each-moment-is-a-place-youve-never-been-108024/

Chicago Style
Strand, Mark. "Each moment is a place you've never been." FixQuotes. March 23, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/each-moment-is-a-place-youve-never-been-108024/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Each moment is a place you've never been." FixQuotes, 23 Mar. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/each-moment-is-a-place-youve-never-been-108024/. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.

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Each Moment Is a Place You Have Never Been
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About the Author

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Mark Strand (April 11, 1934 - November 29, 2014) was a Poet from USA.

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