62 Quotes by 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.

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.

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

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

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 need to be invited onto the back of a motorcycle and taken somewhere unfamiliar now and then; I welcome a degree of disruption, need a curtain pulled back, a hallway leading into some part of the world I've never seen.

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?

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.