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 t…

- Mark Doty

Sentimental assertions are always a form of detachment; they confront the acute, terrible awareness of individual pain, the sharp particularity of lo…

- Mark Doty

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 …

- Mark Doty

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 …

- Mark Doty

Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love. In both states, the imagination's entirely occupied with one person. The beloved dwells a…

- Mark Doty

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

- Mark Doty

Intimacy, says the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, is the highest value. I resist this statement at first. What about artistic achievement, or mora…

- Mark Doty

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, o…

- Mark Doty

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

- Mark Doty