Mark Doty Quotes

Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.

No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins.

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.

We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.

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.

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.

What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?

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

We love disasters that have nothing to do with us

There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem.

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.

It's freeing, to think that there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language.

Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading.

And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.

Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know.

... 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.

Desire can make anything into a god.

All my life I've lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes.

We learn to treasure words that people call us; we learn to live by words that hurt. We cannot toss them aside, so in time they become our dignity.

...in the face of all dangers, in what may seem a godless region, we move forward through the agencies of love and art.

What is healing, but a shift in perspectives?

I want what everybody wants, that's how I know I'm still breathing.

Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process of knowing by means of language.

Because the golden egg gleamedin my basket once, though my childhoodbecame an immense sheet of darkening waterI was Noah, and I was his ark, and there were two of every animal inside me

You can know an animal - or a person, for that matter - in an instant, really, though your understanding can go on unfolding for years.

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.

To tell a story is to take power over it.

...words can help us to see what is graceful or human where lovelines and humanity seem to fail...