I used to walk out, at night, to the breakwater which divides the end of the harbor form the broad moor of the salt marsh. There was nothing to block the wind that had picked up speed and vigor from its Atlantic crossing. I’d study the stars in their brilliant blazing, the diaphanous swath of the milk Way, the distant glow of Boston backlighting the clouds on the horizon as if they’d been drawn there in smudgy charcoal. I felt, perhaps for the first time, particularly American, embedded in American history, here at the nation’s slender tip. Here our westering impulse, having flooded the continent and turned back, finds itself face to face with the originating Atlantic, November’s chill, salt expanses, what Hart Crane called the “unfettered leewardings, ” here at the end of the world. Mark Doty
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More Quotes By Mark Doty
  1. Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.

  2. And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.

  3. What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?

  4. 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.

  5. ...words can help us to see what is graceful or human where lovelines and humanity seem to fail...

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