Mark Doty Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Mark Doty's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Poet Mark Doty's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 35 quotes on this page collected since August 10, 1953! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
All quotes by Mark Doty: Animals Grief Heart more...
  • 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.

  • 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.

    Thinking   Names   Ties  
    Mark Doty (2001). “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon”, Beacon Press (MA)
  • Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process of knowing by means of language.

    Mean   Knowing   Language  
  • I want what everybody wants, that's how I know I'm still breathing.

    Breathing   Want   Stills  
  • 'Everything beautiful occurs when the body / is suspended,' Helena Mesa quotes a performance artist who hangs his own pierced body in the air. Mesa's poems are artfully suspended between lyric and narrative, between humans and animals, between Latin America and the U.S., between desire and the difficulty of its fulfillment. Horse Dance Underwater is an inventive, musical, and powerful debut.

  • 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 (1996). “Heaven's Coast: A Memoir”, Harpercollins
  • 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 individuality of passion with the dulling universal certainty of platitude.

  • What is healing, but a shift in perspectives?

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

    Mark Doty (2009). “Heaven's Coast: A Memoir”, p.4, Harper Collins
  • Desire can make anything into a god.

    Desire  
    Mark Doty (2012). “Paragon Park: Turtle Swan, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, Early Poems”, p.111, David R. Godine Publisher
  • It's freeing, to think that there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language.

    Thinking   Speech   Stuff  
  • 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.

    Moving   Light   House  
    Mark Doty (2001). “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon”, Beacon Press (MA)
  • 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 (2002). “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy”, p.6, Beacon Press
  • And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.

    Kissing   Gone   Ease  
  • 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. Here they are witnesses, companions to the spirit, and as vulnerably mortal as human beings. Socially and politically alert, lamenting and celebrating, Barrington's passionate poems inscribe the broad range of her affections.

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

    Mark Doty (2009). “Dog Years: A Memoir”, p.8, Harper Collins
  • Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading.

  • ... the attempt to render visual intricacy makes words feel unwieldy, like sacks of meaning that must be lugged into place, dragged here and there, then still don't fell accurate.

  • 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.

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

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

  • 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.

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

    Grief   Heart   Thinking  
  • 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.

  • 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.

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

    Thinking   Joy  
    Mark Doty, “Visitation”
  • We love disasters that have nothing to do with us

    Mark Doty (1993). “My Alexandria: Poems”, p.1, University of Illinois Press
  • ...in the face of all dangers, in what may seem a godless region, we move forward through the agencies of love and art.

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

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

    Queens   Said   Sequins  
Page 1 of 2
  • 1
  • 2
  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 35 quotes from the Poet Mark Doty, starting from August 10, 1953! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
    Mark Doty quotes about: Animals Grief Heart