Mark Doty Quotes

Quotes about:

• Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love.
  In both states, the imagination's entirely occupied with one person. The beloved dwells at the heart of the world, and becomes a Rome: the roads of feeling all lead to him, all proceed from him. Everything that touches us seems to relate back to that center: there is no other emotional life, no place outside the universe of feeling centered on its pivotal figure.

  Mark Doty

  Grief, Heart, Being In Love

  Mark Doty (1996). “Heaven's Coast: A Memoir”, Harpercollins

  45 Copy quote

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

  Mark Doty

  Thinking, World, Gateways

  Mark Doty (2009). “Dog Years: A Memoir”, p.8, Harper Collins

  12 Copy quote

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

  Mark Doty

  Long, Individuality, Disappear

  Mark Doty (2002). “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy”, p.7, Beacon Press

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Darkness, Looks, Stories

  11 Copy quote

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

  Mark Doty

  World, Hours, Made

  6 Copy quote

• Here and gone. That’s what it is to be human, I think—to be both someone and no one at once, to hold a particular identity in the world (our names, our place of origins, our family and affectional ties) and to feel that solid set of ties also capable of dissolution, slipping away, as we become moments of attention.

  Mark Doty

  Thinking, Names, Ties

  Mark Doty (2001). “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon”, Beacon Press (MA)

  5 Copy quote

• Grief does not seem to me to be a choice. Whether or not you think grief has value, you will lose what matters to you. The world will break your heart. So I think we’d better look at what grief might offer us. It’s like what Rilke says about self-doubt: it is not going to go away, and therefore you need to think about how it might become your ally.

  Mark Doty

  Grief, Heart, Thinking

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Distance, Reality, Would Be

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• 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

  Ambition, Mean, Silence

  "The lessons of objects: an interview with Mark Doty". Interview with Andrew David King, www.kenyonreview.org. December 12, 2012.

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Grief, Heart, Knowing

  7 Copy quote

• We love disasters that have nothing to do with us

  Mark Doty

  Disaster

  Mark Doty (1993). “My Alexandria: Poems”, p.1, University of Illinois Press

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Kissing, Gone, Ease

  2 Copy quote

• This is what history is: all those centuries of bodies, moving over these canals, twisting and blooming into life in these houses, these streets; all that flesh hungering, coming together, separating, continuing, accumulating, relinquishing, aging and breaking down. Bodies as tulips bent to the demands of light, colored into blossom, spent.

  Mark Doty

  Moving, Light, House

  Mark Doty (2001). “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon”, Beacon Press (MA)

  7 Copy quote

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

  Mark Doty

  Expression, Investigation, Poetry Is

  2 Copy quote

• 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

  Animal, Eggs, Two

  Mark Doty (2012). “Paragon Park: Turtle Swan, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, Early Poems”, p.100, David R. Godine Publisher

  5 Copy quote

• It's unsettling, to lose the safety of the familiar, even when what's disrupted is an ordinary routine. When I began this poem, I was grieving for the loss of my old barbershop in Manhattan, and wondering at the strangeness of my new one. I didn't have any idea the poem would break into the underworld, opening a deeper subject: the continuing force of the old griefs routine helps to mediate, and my strange, sheer wonder at my own survival. Where's home now? In the contingent present, in which anything can disappear, and where we're sometimes granted some form of grace.

  Mark Doty

  Grief, Home, Loss

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Dog, Agreement, Long

  Mark Doty (2009). “Dog Years: A Memoir”, p.1, Harper Collins

  5 Copy quote

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

  Mark Doty

  Diminish

  Mark Doty (2009). “Heaven's Coast: A Memoir”, p.4, Harper Collins

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

  Mark Doty

  Thinking, Joy

  Mark Doty, “Visitation”

  7 Copy quote

• Intimacy, says the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, is the highest value. I resist this statement at first. What about artistic achievement, or moral courage, or heroism, or altruistic acts, or work in the cause of social change? What about wealth or accomplishment? And yet something about it rings true, finally—that what we want is to be brought into relationship, to be inside, within. Perhaps it’s true that nothing matters more to us than that.

  Mark Doty

  Accomplishment, Achievement, Heroism

  Mark Doty (2002). “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy”, p.6, Beacon Press

  3 Copy quote

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

  Mark Doty

  Reading, Broken, Paradise

  3 Copy quote

• Desire can make anything into a god.

  Mark Doty

  Desire

  Mark Doty (2012). “Paragon Park: Turtle Swan, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, Early Poems”, p.111, David R. Godine Publisher

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

  Mark Doty

  Queens, Said, Sequins

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• ...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

  Art, Moving, Agency

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• 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.

  Mark Doty

  Hurt, People, Toss

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