Mark Doty Quotes

“Because this painting has never been restored there is a heightened poignance to it somehow; it doesn’t have the feeling of unassailable permanence that paintings in museums do.There is a small crack in the lower left, and a little of the priming between the wooden panel and the oil emulsions of paint has been bared. A bit of abrasion shows, at the rim of a bowl of berries, evidence of time’s power even over this—which, paradoxically, only seems to increase its poetry, its deep resonance. If you could see the notes of a cello, when the bow draws slowly and deeply across its strings, and those resonant reverberations which of all instruments’ are nearest to the sound of the human voice emerge—no, the wrong verb, they seem to come into being all at once, to surround us, suddenly, with presence—if that were made visible, that would be the poetry of Osias Beert.But the still life resides in absolute silence.Portraits often seem pregnant with speech, or as if their subjects have just finished saying something, or will soon speak the thoughts that inform their faces, the thoughts we’re invited to read. Landscapes are full of presences, visible or unseen; soon nymphs or a stag or a band of hikers will make themselves heard.But no word will ever be spoken here, among the flowers and snails, the solid and dependable apples, this heap of rumpled books, this pewter plate on which a few opened oysters lie, giving up their silver.These are resolutely still, immutable, poised for a forward movement that will never occur. The brink upon which still life rests is the brink of time, the edge of something about to happen. Everything that we know crosses this lip, over and over, like water over the edge of a fall, as what might happen does, as any of the endless variations of what might come true does so, and things fall into being, tumble through the progression of existing in time.Painting creates silence. You could examine the objects themselves, the actors in a Dutch still life—this knobbed beaker, this pewter salver, this knife—and, lovely as all antique utilitarian objects are, they are not, would not be, poised on the edge these same things inhabit when they are represented.These things exist—if indeed they are still around at all—in time. It is the act of painting them that makes them perennially poised, an emergent truth about to be articulated, a word waiting to be spoken. Single word that has been forming all these years in the light on the knife’s pearl handle, in the drops of moisture on nearly translucent grapes: At the end of time, will that word be said?”

“Man maintains his balance, poise, and sense of security only as he is moving forward.”

“At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.”

“The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary, Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

“Asides your power, passion and poise, what glues the posters of your impacts on memorial walls is how you treat those you need and those who need you.”

“The hardest thing to do is watch the one you love, love someone else”

“CHERISH a heart like you'd carry an egg, cause when it drops it becomes pieces of shell, never to be MENDED”

“On your way to accomplish greatness, you will hear a lot of noise. Listen to your inner voice and never let the distraction of the crowd discolour your poise.”

“A panther poised in the cypress tree about to jump is apanther poised in a cypress tree about to jump.The panther is a poem of fire green eyes and a heart chargedby four winds of four directions.The panther hears everything in the dark: the unspokentears of a few hundred human years, storms that will breakwhat has broken his world, a bluebird swaying on a branch afew miles away.He hears the death song of his approaching”

“When we are faced with circumstances, He gives us the Power to endure! When we are faced with loss, He grants us the Poise to hold on. When we come across failure, He installs back in us the Potential to rise up again. When we meet death, He gave us the Pleasure to be carried up into the Lovely coasts of eternity!”