62 Quotes by Mark Doty

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.

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

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

Christmas Eve, I give him packages which I open for him, since the bows and paper represent more labor than he could manage: music videos by the Nashville singers he thinks particularly sexy, fleece-lined slippers decorated with images of bacon and eggs, and a book about breeds of dogs. He says he wishes he had something for me to open, but I don’t want anything except to have him here. There’s nothing more he could give me than his life, right now, his being with me.

When the Self dissolves into a world of separate selves and death becomes real, love becomes a pact with grief; what is gained then is the inescapability poignant fact of individuality. There will never be another you, and I love the stubborn particularity of you because you will disappear.

...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.

There is a Japanese word for things made more beautiful by use, that bear the evidence of their own making, or the individuating marks of time's passage: a kind of beauty not immune to time but embedded in it.

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.