Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it. — Mark Doty Gateways Copy Share Image
I want what everybody wants, that's how I know I'm still breathing... — Mark Doty Breathing 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 Aspect Copy Share Image
“Does the poem reside in experience or in self-consciousness about experience?” — Mark Doty Poetry Copy Share Image
Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process of knowing by means of language. — Mark Doty Knowing Copy Share Image
Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading. — Mark Doty Broken Copy Share Image
Even sad stories are company. And perhaps that's why you might read such a chronicle, to look into a companionable darkness that… — Mark Doty Business Copy Share Image
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 Body Copy Share Image
All my life I've lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes. — Mark Doty Constantly 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 Agency 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 Agree 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
Because the golden egg gleamed in my basket once, though my childhood became an immense sheet of darkening water I was Noah,… — Mark Doty Animal Copy Share Image
The World Will Break Your Heart. Grief might be, in some ways, the long aftermath of love, the internal work of knowing,… — Mark Doty Aftermath 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 Assertion 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
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
The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just… — Mark Doty Concrete 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 Air 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
“And something else, of course; there’s always more, deep in art’s pockets, far down in the chiaroscuro on which these foodstuffs rest:… — Mark Doty Art Copy Share Image
Questions, inside the larger mystery of sorrow, which contains us and our daily transit, and is large enough indeed to contain the… — Mark Doty Brightness Copy Share Image
In Judith Barrington's striking collection, Horses and the Human Soul, human emotions come ushered and accompanied by animal companions, especially the horses… — Mark Doty Affection 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
“I’d write and read and let myself, a little at a time, step down into myself- like a stairway down into a… — Mark Doty Caretaking Copy Share Image
“But we have, if not our understanding, our own experience, and it feels to me sealed, inviolable, ours. We have a last,… — Mark Doty Aids Copy Share Image
“One last mystery: on one of the little ponds, this morning, I saw wind riffling the first of the waterlily leaves. They… — Mark Doty Beauty Copy Share Image
“I am not, anymore, a Christian, but I am lifted and opened by any space with prayer inside it. I didn’t know… — Mark Doty Aids Copy Share Image
“Desire I think has less to do with possession than with participation, the will to involve oneself in the body of the… — Mark Doty Desire 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
