“...words can help us to see what is graceful or human where lovelines and humanity seem to fail...”
Mark Doty“Because the golden egg gleamedin my basket once, though my childhoodbecame an immense sheet of darkening waterI was Noah, and I was his ark,and there were two of every animal inside me”
Mark Doty“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“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“What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?”
Mark Doty“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“Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.”
Mark Doty“To tell a story is to take power over it.”
Mark Doty, Firebird“...words can help us to see what is graceful or human where lovelines and humanity seem to fail...”
Mark Doty, Firebird“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, Dog Years“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, Dog Years