Mark Doty Quotes

25 quotes in 457 categories

• Sentimental assertions are always a form of detachment; they confront the acute, terrible awareness of individual pain, the sharp particularity of loss or the fierce…
• Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading.
• All my life I've lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes.
• There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem.
• 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…
• 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.
• 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…
• 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.…
• 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…
• We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.
• 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…
• In Judith Barrington's striking collection, Horses and the Human Soul, human emotions come ushered and accompanied by animal companions, especially the horses this speaker loves.…
• We love disasters that have nothing to do with us
• What is healing, but a shift in perspectives?
• I want what everybody wants, that's how I know I'm still breathing...
• It's freeing, to think that there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language.
• 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…
• What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?
• Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.

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