Life & Wisdom Quote by Mark Strand

A poet’s confession disguised as a shrug: if you have to explain your process, you’ve probably already betrayed it. Strand’s line has the dry economy of someone who knows that the most interesting human motives rarely survive daylight. “For some of us” is doing social work here. It’s not an absolute rule, not a manifesto; it’s a small, wry coalition of the discreet, the private, the slightly guilty. He invites you in without naming the membership card.

The phrase “the way we do things” is deliberately bland, almost bureaucratic, which makes the subtext sharper. It can mean artistic method (how a poem gets made, why an image arrives, why a line breaks where it does), but it also hints at character: habits, evasions, compromises, rituals. Strand implies that articulation is not neutral. To describe a method is to let it be judged, copied, cleaned up for public consumption. Silence becomes a kind of quality control.

Context matters because Strand’s work often circles absence, vacancy, the slippery edges of the self. In that world, talk is a form of misdirection: it produces a story of intention when the real engine might be accident, obsession, or something unflattering. The sentence also lightly mocks our culture of constant disclosure - the demand to narrate our productivity, justify our decisions, brand our inner life. Strand’s refusal isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-performative. Some truths keep their power only when they’re not turned into content.