"Cheat me not with time, with the dull ache of flesh, for all flesh turns, even the loveliest ankle and frail thigh, to bitterest dust." — Hilda Doolittle, American poet, born 1886
"What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love." — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russian novelist, born 1821
"People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel." — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russian novelist, born 1821
"The terrifying power of darkness is inseparable from the redemptive power of the sacred, the deeper we are drawn into the creative depth of darkness the more real the actual presence of the sacred becomes." — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russian novelist, born 1821
"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russian novelist, born 1821
"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 what we have lost." — Mark Doty, American poet, born 1953
"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, American poet, born 1953
"Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading." — Mark Doty, American poet, born 1953
"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, American poet, born 1953
"One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that preceded the poem." — Mark Doty, American poet, born 1953
"Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it." — Mark Doty, American poet, born 1953