Quote

We learn to treasure words that people call us we learn to live by words that hurt. We cannot toss them aside, so in time they become our dignity.

Mark Doty

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Mark Doty
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: August 10
Poet
Maryville
Tennessee
Call
Words
Learn
Cannot
Toss
Become
Aside
Live
Treasure
Time
Dignity
People
Hurt

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This is what history is: all those centuries of bodies, moving over these canals, twisting and blooming into life in these houses, these streets all that flesh hungering, coming together, separating, continuing, accumulating, relinquishing, aging and breaking down. Bodies as tulips bent to the demands of light, colored into blossom, spent.
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Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.
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... the attempt to render visual intricacy makes words feel unwieldy, like sacks of meaning that must be lugged into place, dragged here and there, then still don't fell accurate.
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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.
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What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?
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Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know.
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And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.
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No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins.
Mark Doty
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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.
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We love disasters that have nothing to do with us
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Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process of knowing by means of language.
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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
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Desire can make anything into a god.
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It's freeing, to think that there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language.
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We long to connect we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.
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Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading.
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All my life I've lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes.
Mark Doty
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I want what everybody wants, that's how I know I'm still breathing.
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Here and gone. That’s what it is to be human, I think—to be both someone and no one at once, to hold a particular identity in the world (our names, our place of origins, our family and affectional ties) and to feel that solid set of ties also capable of dissolution, slipping away, as we become moments of attention.
Mark Doty