Mark Doty 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

  Mark Doty (1996). “Heaven's Coast: A Memoir”, Harpercollins

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

  Mark Doty

  Thinking, World, Gateways

  Mark Doty (2009). “Dog Years: A Memoir”, p.8, Harper Collins

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

  Mark Doty

  Expression, Investigation, Poetry Is

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• Elegir vivir con un perro es aceptar participar en un largo proceso de interpretación, un acuerdo mutuo aunque el ser humano tiene la mayoría de las cartas.

  Mark Doty

  Dog, Agreement, Long

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

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

  Mark Doty

  World, Hours, Made

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• 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

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• 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

  Mark Doty (2001). “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon”, Beacon Press (MA)

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• La reinvención física del mundo es interminable, implacable, fascinante, exhaustiva; nada de lo que parece sólido lo es. Si pudiéramos situarnos a una pequeña distancia en el tiempo, veríamos lo fluida y cambiante que es la realidad física, todo se precipita hacia alguna otra forma, incluso el hormigón, incluso la piedra.

  Mark Doty

  Distance, Reality, Would Be

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

  Mark Doty

  Long, Individuality, Disappear

  Mark Doty (2002). “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy”, p.7, Beacon Press

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• 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

  Ambition, Mean, Silence

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

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• 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

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• 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, Looks, Stories

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• We love disasters that have nothing to do with us

  Mark Doty

  Catástrofe

  Mark Doty (1993). “My Alexandria: Poems”, p.1, University of Illinois Press

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• 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, Gone, Ease

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• Desire can make anything into a god.

  Mark Doty

  Deseo

  Mark Doty (2012). “Paragon Park: Turtle Swan, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, Early Poems”, p.111, David R. Godine Publisher

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• 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

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• 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

  Mark Doty (2001). “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon”, Beacon Press (MA)

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• Es inquietante perder la seguridad de lo familiar, incluso cuando lo que se interrumpe es una rutina ordinaria. Cuando empecé este poema, lloraba la pérdida de mi antigua barbería en Manhattan y me preguntaba por la extrañeza de la nueva. No tenía ni idea de que el poema irrumpiría en el submundo, abriendo un tema más profundo: la fuerza continuada de las viejas penas que la rutina ayuda a mediar, y mi extraño y puro asombro ante mi propia supervivencia. ¿Dónde está ahora el hogar? En el presente contingente, en el que todo puede desaparecer, y donde a veces se nos concede alguna forma de gracia.

  Mark Doty

  Grief, Home, Loss

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• 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

  Mark Doty (2012). “Paragon Park: Turtle Swan, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, Early Poems”, p.100, David R. Godine Publisher

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

  Mark Doty

  Thinking, Joy

  Mark Doty, “Visitation”

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• 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.

  Mark Doty

  Hurt, People, Toss

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• ... 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.

  Mark Doty

  Here And There, Intricacy, Feels

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

  Mark Doty

  Reading, Broken, Paradise

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• 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, Moving

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

  Mark Doty

  Disminuir

  Mark Doty (2009). “Heaven's Coast: A Memoir”, p.4, Harper Collins

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