Top 46 Mark Doty Quotes
#1. All my life I've lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes.
Mark Doty
#2. Our new millennium began, and it seemed a little bit possible--though surely if we examined the thought too closely, it would evaporate--that a brighter time might be ahead; we have, after all, the round, clean slate of the new number, the row of zeros after the initial digit in 2000.
Mark Doty
#3. My mood settles around me, a wool coat that seems to grow heavier with the months in which I accomplish very little--and then, since the coat is too heavy to allow movement, accomplish nothing at all.
Mark Doty
#4. To choose to live with a dog is to agree to participate in a long process of interpretation, a mutual agreement though the human being holds most of the cards.
Mark Doty
#5. Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process
of knowing by means of language.
Mark Doty
#6. Desire can make anything into a god.
Mark Doty
#7. What is memory but a story about how we have lived?
Mark Doty
#8. What is healing, but a shift in perspectives?
Mark Doty
#9. Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.
Mark Doty
#10. One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that preceded the poem.
Mark Doty
#11. We live the stories we tell; the stories we don't tell live us.
Mark Doty
#12. To tell a story is to take power over it.
Mark Doty
#13. I want what everybody wants,
that's how I know I'm still
breathing ...
Mark Doty
#14. Because the golden egg gleamed
in my basket once, though my childhood
became an immense sheet of darkening water
I was Noah, and I was his ark,
and there were two of every animal inside me
Mark Doty
#15. It's freeing, to think that there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language.
Mark Doty
#16. Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading.
Mark Doty
#17. What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?
Mark Doty
#18. ...words can help us to see what is graceful or human where lovelines and humanity seem to fail...
Mark Doty
#19. Though there's something more
tender, beneath our vanity,
our will to become objects
of desire: we sweat the mark
of our presence onto the cloth.
Mark Doty
#20. A walk is a walk and must be taken; breakfast and dinner come when they are due. The routines of the living are inviolable, no hiatus called on account of misery, spiritual crisis, or awful weather.
Mark Doty
#21. No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins.
Mark Doty
#22. We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.
Mark Doty
#23. And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.
Mark Doty
#24. The World Will Break Your Heart. Grief might be, in some ways, the long aftermath of love, the internal work of knowing, holding, more fully valuing what we have lost.
Mark Doty
#25. In the face of all dangers, in what may seem a godless region, we move forward through the agencies of love and art.
Mark Doty
#26. But in a still life, there is no end to our looking, which has become allied with the gaze of the painter; we look in and in, to the world of things, in their ambiance of cool or warm light, in and in, as long as we can stand to look, as long as we take pleasure in looking.
Mark Doty
#27. We love disasters that have nothing to do with us
Mark Doty
#28. This is the entrance
To the city of you...
Mark Doty
#29. Who can even imagine what that would mean, for blue to be - well, more? All
Mark Doty
#30. And now, a heap of roses
beside the sea, white rugosa
beside the foaming hem of shore:
brave,
waxen candles ...
And we talk
as if death were a line to be crossed.
Look at them, the white roses.
Tell me where they end.
Mark Doty
#31. However much grief I carried, I liked the way my life was tending, these bright new directions. It's only human, to mourn and to reach toward forwardness at once.
Mark Doty
#32. The attempt to render visual intricacy makes words feel unwieldy, like sacks of meaning that must be lugged into place, dragged here and there, then still don't fell accurate.
Mark Doty
#33. It's a familiar experience to poets, that arrival of a phrase laden with more sense than we can immediately discern, a cluster of words that seems to know, as it were, more than we do.
Mark Doty
#34. There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem.
Mark Doty
#35. And I was cooking for three, and teaching, and taking care of a man who'd just collapsed in my house; learning to cook like June Cleaver didn't exactly seem an option.
Mark Doty
#36. Under the radiant towers, the floodlit ramparts,
must have wondered at my impulse to touch her,
which was like touching myself,
the way your own hand feels when you hold it
because you want to feel contained.
Mark Doty
#37. The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just a little distance in time, how fluid and shape-shifting physical reality would be, everything hurrying into some other form, even concrete, even stone.
Mark Doty
#38. Judy, of course, doesn't stand in the ruins; she is the ruin. In this way she enthralled a generation of gay men, singing her way out of suffering while still bearing the inescapable marks of damage.
Mark Doty
#39. Even sad stories are company. And perhaps that's why you might read such a chronicle, to look into a companionable darkness that isn't yours.
Mark Doty
#40. Does the poem reside in experience or in self-consciousness about experience?
Mark Doty
#41. Doesn't rain make a memory more intimate?
Mark Doty
#42. Say what you see and you experience yourself through your style of seeing and saying.
Mark Doty
#43. (I know, lacquer
and tumble and glow,
burnished and fired
and hazed) it's because
what else Lord
to wear? Every sequin's
an act of praise.
Mark Doty
#44. There is a Japanese word for things made more beautiful by use, that bear the evidence of their own making, or the individuating marks of time's passage: a kind of beauty not immune to time but embedded in it.
Mark Doty
#45. Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know.
Mark Doty
#46. You can know an animal - or a person, for that matter - in an instant, really, though your understanding can go on unfolding for years.
Mark Doty
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