Quotes by Mark Doty

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

“And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.”

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

“To tell a story is to take power over it.”

“And, I think, this greening does thaw at the edges, at least, of my own cold season. Joy sneaks in: listening to music, riding my bicycle, I catch myself feeling, in a way thats as old as I am but ...”

“Ive 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 Ive been holding myselfMos...”

“One last mystery: on one of the little ponds, this morning, I saw wind riffling the first of the waterlily leaves. They havent all emerged yet, but new circles tattoo the water, here and there, a c...”

“Desire I think has less to do with possession than with participation, the will to involve oneself in the body of the world, in the principle of things expressing itself in splendid specificity, a ...”

“My mood settles around me, a wool coat that seems to grow heavier with the months in which I accomplish very little--and then, since the coat is too heavy to allow movement, accomplish nothing at all.”

“I am not, anymore, a Christian, but I am lifted and opened by any space with prayer inside it. I didnt know why I was going, today, to stand in the long cool darkness of St. John of the Divine, but...”

“But we have, if not our understanding, our own experience, and it feels to me sealed, inviolable, ours. We have a last, deep week together, because Wally is not on morphine yet, because he has just...”

“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-shiftin...”

“Id write and read and let myself, a little at a time, step down into myself- like a stairway down into a dark, intimate kiva- where the work of vigil is taking place, the necessary attending. I ima...”

“...words can help us to see what is graceful or human where lovelines and humanity seem to fail...”

“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.”

“What can I do but stand with my mouth open, no sound emerging? My lips move and I wave my arms making gestures from the other side of the glass, which I cant penetrate.people can speak out of anyth...”

“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...”

“I dont know anything different about death than I ever have, but I feel differently. I inhabit this difference in feeling- or does it live in me?- at the same time as Im sorrowing. The possibility ...”

“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.”

“After he died, there was a deep calm to his face; he seemed a kind of unfathomable, still well which opened on and down beneath the suddenly smooth surface of his skinThe heat in him lasted a long ...”