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Desire Quote by Mark Doty

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““Though there's something more tender, beneath our vanity, our will to become objects of desire: we sweat the mark of our presence onto the cloth.””

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Desire

More by Mark Doty

One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that…

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... the attempt to render visual intricacy makes words feel unwieldy, like sacks of meaning that must be lugged into place, dragged here and…

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“And now, a heap of roses beside the sea, white rugosa beside the foaming hem of shore: brave, waxen candles… And we talk as…

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“Doesn’t rain make a memory more intimate?”

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“I used to walk out, at night, to the breakwater which divides the end of the harbor form the broad moor of the salt…

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“And, I think, this greening does thaw at the edges, at least, of my own cold season. Joy sneaks in: listening to music, riding…

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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…

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

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We love disasters that have nothing to do with us

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“Does the poem reside in experience or in self-consciousness about experience?”

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'Everything beautiful occurs when the body / is suspended,' Helena Mesa quotes a performance artist who hangs his own pierced body in the air.…

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Intimacy, says the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, is the highest value. I resist this statement at first. What about artistic achievement, or moral courage, or…

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Explore all 59 Mark Doty quotes

More Desire quotes

I put myself in the student's place and remember the frustrations, doubts, determination, and desires I felt when I was going through the initial…

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Passion is what you need to be good, an unforgiving passion.

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I want the municipality to be a helping hand to the man with a desire of sympathy, to help the fallen when it is…

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Ye youths and virgins, when your generous blood Has drunk the warmth of fifteen summers, now The loves invite; now to new rapture wakes…

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I have observed this in my experience of slavery, - that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only…

Frederick Douglass

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On the brink of being satiated, desire still appears infinite.

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If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the…

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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He caught her, she fell, he caught her in his arms, he held her tightly unconscious of what he was doing. He held her…

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Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit. My three [great teachers] did not…

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“The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important.”

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In discovering books, you became free to explore the full range of human motives, desires, secrets, and lies. All my life, people have scolded…

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I have never been in, nor have I had any strong particular desire to be in, what is termed a costume drama, but I…

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