62 Quotes by Mark Doty

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

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.

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.

It’s freeing, to think that there’s always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language.

We love disasters that have nothing to do with us.

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

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.

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.

Desire can make anything into a god.