62 Quotes by Mark Doty

I imagine many urban dwellers love this feeling, that moment when you step out of your building and whatever has preoccupied you goes flapping away like a burst of pigeons rising all at once, wing and wind carrying them out into this pulsing, indifferent life.

And I was cooking for three, and teaching, and taking care of a man who’d just collapsed in my house; learning to cook like June Cleaver didn’t exactly seem an option.

Unspeakable"--unspeakability?--comes in three varieties.First, that which cannot be said because one does not know it, and therefore cannot say it.Second, that which cannot be spoken because it is culturally impermissible to do so.And third, that which cannot be named because it is impossible, since the language provides no terms, no words to enable articulation.

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.

It makes you crazy, for something you know to be true, know from the very core or root of you, to remain unspeakable.

But in a still life, there is no end to our looking, which has become allied with the gaze of the painter; we look in and in, to the world of things, in their ambiance of cool or warm light, in and in, as long as we can stand to look, as long as we take pleasure in looking.

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.

This is the entranceTo the city of you...

What is healing, but a shift in perspectives?