I want what everybody wants, that's how I know I'm still breathing... — Mark Doty Breathing Copy Share Image
Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know. — Mark Doty Depression Copy Share Image
We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear. — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
All my life I've lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes. — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
...in the face of all dangers, in what may seem a godless region, we move forward through the agencies of love and… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem. — Mark Doty Consent Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“Does the poem reside in experience or in self-consciousness about experience?” — Mark Doty Poetry Copy Share Image
“(I know, lacquer and tumble and glow , burnished and fired and hazed ) it’s because what else Lord to wear? Every… — Mark Doty Fashion Copy Share Image
Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process of knowing by means of language. — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
Sentimental assertions are always a form of detachment; they confront the acute, terrible awareness of individual pain, the sharp particularity of loss… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
“Though there's something more tender, beneath our vanity, our will to become objects of desire: we sweat the mark of our presence… — Mark Doty Desire Copy Share Image
One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the… — Mark Doty Ambition Copy Share Image
... the attempt to render visual intricacy makes words feel unwieldy, like sacks of meaning that must be lugged into place, dragged… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
We learn to treasure words that people call us; we learn to live by words that hurt. We cannot toss them aside,… — Mark Doty Dignity Copy Share Image
“And now, a heap of roses beside the sea, white rugosa beside the foaming hem of shore: brave, waxen candles… And we… — Mark Doty Flowers Copy Share Image
To choose to live with a dog is to agree to participate in a long process of interpretation, a mutual agreement though… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
“under the radiant towers, the floodlit ramparts, must have wondered at my impulse to touch her, which was like touching myself, the… — Mark Doty Touching Copy Share Image
Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love. In both states, the imagination's entirely occupied with one person.… — Mark Doty Being in love Copy Share Image
“I don’t know anything different about death than I ever have, but I feel differently. I inhabit this difference in feeling- or… — Mark Doty Death Copy Share Image
It's unsettling, to lose the safety of the familiar, even when what's disrupted is an ordinary routine. When I began this poem,… — Mark Doty Barbershop Copy Share Image
Grief does not seem to me to be a choice. Whether or not you think grief has value, you will lose what… — Mark Doty Allies Copy Share Image
Here and gone. That’s what it is to be human, I think—to be both someone and no one at once, to hold… — Mark Doty Attention Copy Share Image
'Everything beautiful occurs when the body / is suspended,' Helena Mesa quotes a performance artist who hangs his own pierced body in… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
This is what history is: all those centuries of bodies, moving over these canals, twisting and blooming into life in these houses,… — Mark Doty Aging Copy Share Image
“What can I do but stand with my mouth open, no sound emerging? My lips move and I wave my arms making… — Mark Doty Faith Copy Share Image
“In the museums we used to visit on family vacations when I was a kid, I used to love those rooms which… — Mark Doty Death Copy Share Image
“I used to walk out, at night, to the breakwater which divides the end of the harbor form the broad moor of… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
“Because this painting has never been restored there is a heightened poignance to it somehow; it doesn’t have the feeling of unassailable… — Mark Doty Art Copy Share Image
“The state of mind above which my distraction floats like fog is suddenly perfectly clear, though the right word for it is… — Mark Doty Death Copy Share Image
“…There is some firm place in me which knows that what happened to Wally, whatever it was, whatever it is that death… — Mark Doty Contradiction Copy Share Image
“…I have fallen in love with a painting. Though that phrase doesn’t seem to suffice, not really—rather’s it that I have been… — Mark Doty Art Copy Share Image
“And, I think, this greening does thaw at the edges, at least, of my own cold season. Joy sneaks in: listening to… — Mark Doty Grief Copy Share Image
