Quotes from Mark Doty

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.

Doesn't rain make a memory more intimate?

And now, a heap of roses beside the sea, white rugosa beside the foaming hem of shore: brave, waxen candles… And we talk as if death were a line to be crossed. Look at them, the white roses. Tell me where they end.

Maybe we should be glad, finally, that the word can't go where the heart can, not completely. It's freeing, to think there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language. Love is common, too, absolutely so—and yet our words for it only point to it; they do not describe it. They are indicators of something immense: the word love is merely a sign that means something like This way to the mountain.

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

under the radiant towers, the floodlit ramparts, must have wondered at my impulse to touch her, which was like touching myself, the way your own hand feels when you hold it because you want to feel contained.

This is the entrance To the city of you...

A walk is a walk and must be taken; breakfast and dinner come when they are due. The routines of the living are inviolable, no hiatus called on account of misery, spiritual crisis, or awful weather.

What is memory but a story about how we have lived?

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.

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.

We love disasters that have nothing to do with us

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

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

The heart is a repository of vanished things:

But in a still life, there is no end to our looking, which has become allied with the gaze of the painter; we look in and in, to the world of things, in their ambiance of cool or warm light, in and in, as long as we can stand to look, as long as we take pleasure in looking.

Say what you see and you experience yourself through your style of seeing and saying.

However much grief I carried, I liked the way my life was tending, these bright new directions. It's only human, to mourn and to reach toward forwardness at once.

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.

Don't go in fear of that which has been looked at again and again. Poets return to the MOON immemorially; it is deeply compelling and we probably won't ever get done with it. The challenge is to look at the familiar without the expected scaffolding of seeing, and the payoff is that such a gaze feels enormously rewarding; it wakes us up, when the old verities are dusted off, the tired approaches set aside.

Concerning Some Recent Criticism of His Work —Glaze and shimmer, luster and gleam; can't he think of anything but all that sheen? —No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins.

It's a familiar experience to poets, that arrival of a phrase laden with more sense than we can immediately discern, a cluster of words that seems to know, as it were, more than we do.

You can know an animal - or a person, for that matter - in an instant, really, though your understanding can go on unfolding for years.

I imagine many urban dwellers love this feeling, that moment when you step out of your building and whatever has preoccupied you goes flapping away like a burst of pigeons rising all at once, wing and wind carrying them out into this pulsing, indifferent life.