Quotes from Mark Doty

I didn't judge; it was as if that were part of my purpose: I wanted to know the men who moved through my nights like passing comets, wanted them to feel the pleasure of being known.

Those lists of men in Whitman's papers--a collector's catalog, a record of the body's travels? How else will I know the world, if not by touching as much of it as possible, finding in the bodies of my lovers and fellows my coordinates?

Or, when an artist hungry for validation finally receives some, there's a temptation to play to those who offered it, and with that comes the risk of imitating oneself, producing paler, anemic versions of the vital art that you made with no notion of where it was headed, before you'd made anything to imitate.

For a spirit that roamed restlessly, entering into every jot of the teeming life around him, stillness must have held a deep allure. If you are everything and everywhere, how restful it must seem to be no one and no where.

I know, lacquer and tumble and glow , burnished and fired and hazed ) it's because what else Lord to wear? Every sequin's an act of praise.

What does being on earth ask of us? The world wants to be rescued from evanescence, to be translated into an immaterial realm that does not perish because it was never exactly alive. To become, in other words, poetry--either in the poem the poet writes out of engagement with things, or in the interior "poem" of anyone who loves the world, the never-said words we come, over time, to carry within us.

What is healing, but a shift in perspective?

Our new millennium began, and it seemed a little bit possible--though surely if we examined the thought too closely, it would evaporate--that a brighter time might be ahead; we have, after all, the round, clean slate of the new number, the row of zeros after the initial digit in 2000.

Judy, of course, doesn't stand in the ruins; she is the ruin. In this way she enthralled a generation of gay men, singing her way out of suffering while still bearing the inescapable marks of damage.

I think I understood intuitively that there was no sustenance for me in the religion of explanation and prohibition.

Desire I think has less to do with possession than with participation