Mark Doty > Quotes

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

“I want what everybody wants,
that's how I know I'm still

breathing...”
― Mark Doty, Sweet Machine

“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, Still Life With Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy

“What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?”
― Mark Doty

“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

“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

“No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins.”
― Mark Doty

“Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading.”
― 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, Dog Years

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

“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

“...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, Dog Years