Top 35 Mark Doty Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What is healing, but a shift in perspectives?”

— Mark Doty

2. “The World Will Break Your Heart. Grief might be, in some ways, the long aftermath of love, the internal work of knowing, holding, more fully valuing what we have lost.”

— Mark Doty

3. “I want what everybody wants, that’s how I know I’m still breathing...”

— Mark Doty

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

— Mark Doty

5. “Desire can make anything into a god.”

— Mark Doty

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

— Mark Doty

7. “No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins.”

— Mark Doty

8. “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.”

— Mark Doty

9. “One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that preceded the poem.”

— Mark Doty

10. “Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading.”

— Mark Doty

11. “To choose to live with a dog is to agree to participate in a long process of interpretation, a mutual agreement though the human being holds most of the cards.”

— Mark Doty

12. “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.”

— Mark Doty

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

— Mark Doty

14. “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.”

— Mark Doty

15. “All my life I’ve lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes.”

— Mark Doty

16. “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.”

— Mark Doty

17. “Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know.”

— Mark Doty

18. “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.”

— Mark Doty

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

— Mark Doty

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

— Mark Doty

21. “Maybe we should be glad, finally, that the word can’t go where the heart can, not completely. It’s freeing, to think there’s always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language. Love is common, too, absolutely so – and yet our words for it only point to it; they do not describe it. They are indicators of something immense: the word love is merely a sign that means something like This way to the mountain.”

— Mark Doty

22. “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.”

— Mark Doty

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

— Mark Doty

24. “It’s a familiar experience to poets, that arrival of a phrase laden with more sense than we can immediately discern, a cluster of words that seems to know, as it were, more than we do.”

— Mark Doty

25. “What is memory but a story about how we have lived?”

— Mark Doty

26. “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.”

— Mark Doty

27. “The heart is a repository of vanished things:.”

— Mark Doty

28. “Don’t go in fear of that which has been looked at again and again. Poets return to the MOON immemorially; it is deeply compelling and we probably won’t ever get done with it. The challenge is to look at the familiar without the expected scaffolding of seeing, and the payoff is that such a gaze feels enormously rewarding; it wakes us up, when the old verities are dusted off, the tired approaches set aside.”

— Mark Doty

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

— Mark Doty

30. “We love disasters that have nothing to do with us.”

— Mark Doty

31. “Intimacy, says the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, is the highest value. I resist this statement at first. What about artistic achievement, or moral courage, or heroism, or altruistic acts, or work in the cause of social change? What about wealth or accomplishment? And yet something about it rings true, finally – that what we want is to be brought into relationship, to be inside, within. Perhaps it’s true that nothing matters more to us than that.”

— Mark Doty

32. “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.”

— Mark Doty

33. “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.”

— Mark Doty

34. “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.”

— Mark Doty

35. “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.”

— Mark Doty