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
But in a still life, there is no end to our looking, which has become allied with the gaze of the painter; we look in and in, to the world of things, in their ambiance of cool or warm light, in and in, as long as we can stand to look, as long as we take pleasure in looking. - 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
What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing? - 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
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
There is a Japanese word for things made more beautiful by use, that bear the evidence of their own making, or the individuating marks of time's passage: a kind of beauty not immune to time but embedded in it. - Mark Doty
Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it. - Mark Doty