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

Mark Doty

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Mark Doty
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: August 10
Poet
Maryville
Tennessee
Expression
Investigation
Poetry

More quotes by Mark Doty

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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
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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
Mark Doty
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I want what everybody wants, that's how I know I'm still breathing.
Mark Doty
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We long to connect we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.
Mark Doty
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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.
Mark Doty
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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.
Mark Doty
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Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process of knowing by means of language.
Mark Doty
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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.
Mark Doty
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No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins.
Mark Doty
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Desire can make anything into a god.
Mark Doty
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Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading.
Mark Doty
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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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All my life I've lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes.
Mark Doty
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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.
Mark Doty
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What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?
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.
Mark Doty
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Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.
Mark Doty
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We love disasters that have nothing to do with us
Mark Doty
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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.
Mark Doty