Mark Doty famous quotes

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

#Grief #Heart #Being In Love

What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?
-- Mark Doty

#Thinking #Joy

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

#Accomplishment #Achievement #Gaston

Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.
-- Mark Doty

#Thinking #World #Gateways

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.
-- Mark Doty

#Grief #Home #Loss

'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.
-- Mark Doty

#Beautiful #Horse #Powerful

Questions, inside the larger mystery of sorrow, which contains us and our daily transit, and is large enough indeed to contain the whole shifting tidal theater where I make small constructions, my metaphors, my defenses. Against which I play out theories, doubts, certainties bright as high tide in sunlight, which shift just as that brightness does, in fog or rain.
-- Mark Doty

#Rain #Fog #Play

I've been moving a little to the music while I worked ...and then I realize I am actually dancing. It feels wonderful, though I can feel how stiff my muscles are, how rigidly I've been holding myself...Mostly I've been moving cautiously, numbly, steeled because I know, at any moment, I may be ambushed by overwhelming grief. You never know when it's coming, the word or gesture or bit of memory that dissolved you entirely...It happens every day at first, then not for a day or two, then there's a week when grief washes in every morning, every afternoon.
-- Mark Doty

#Morning #Memories #Grief

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.
-- Mark Doty

#Darkness #Might #Looks

No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins.
-- Mark Doty

#Queens #Said

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.
-- Mark Doty

#Moving #Light #House

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

#Kissing #Body #Gone

...in the face of all dangers, in what may seem a godless region, we move forward through the agencies of love and art.
-- Mark Doty

#Art #Moving #Agency

Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading.
-- Mark Doty

#Reading #Broken #Paradise

What is healing, but a shift in perspectives?
-- Mark Doty

#Healing #Perspective

I want what everybody wants, that's how I know I'm still breathing...
-- Mark Doty

#Breathing #Want #Stills

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.
-- Mark Doty

#Thinking #Names #Ties

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.
-- Mark Doty

#Inspirational #Pain #Passion

There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem.
-- Mark Doty

#World #Hours #Made

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

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

#Thinking #Stuff #Speech

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 his ark, and there were two of every animal inside me
-- Mark Doty

#Animal #Eggs #Two

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.
-- Mark Doty

#Distance #Reality #Would Be

We love disasters that have nothing to do with us
-- Mark Doty

#Disaster

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.
-- Mark Doty

#Horse #Animal #Soul

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 valuing what we have lost.
-- Mark Doty

#Grief #Heart #Knowing

We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.
-- Mark Doty

#Long #Individuality #Disappear

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.
-- Mark Doty

#Grief #Heart #Thinking

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.
-- Mark Doty

#Dog #Agreement #Long

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.
-- Mark Doty

#Mean #Ambition #Silence