Mary Ruefle Quotes

I have become an orchid washed in on the salt white beach. Memory, what can I make of it now that might please you- this life, already wasted and still strewn with miracles?

A poem is a finished work of the mind, it is not the work of a finished mind.

We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love—a connection between things.

In life, the number of beginnings is exactly equal to the number of endings ... In poetry, the number of beginnings so far exceeds the number of endings that we cannot even conceive of it.

in the beginning William Shakespeare was a baby, and knew absolutely nothing. He couldn't even speak.

Art has always been aware of itself as art.

I'm lucky enough to occasionally be able to do something I love - write poems - and unlucky enough that what I love confuses and overwhelms me.

In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?

In the end I would rather wonder than know

The origins of poetry are clearly rooted in obscurity, in secretiveness, in incantation, in spells that must at once invoke and protect, tell the secret and keep it.

Something unpronounceable followed by a long silence points out my life is becoming a landscape.

There is a world which poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.

A poem is a neutrino - mainly nothing - it has no mass and can pass through the earth undetected.

Words have a love for each other, a desire that culminates in poetry.

Irreverence is a way of playing hooky and remaining present at the same time.

People, the people we really love, where did they come from? What did we do to deserve them?

the wasting of time is the most personal, most private, most intimate form of conversation with oneself, as well as with another.

Every creative act is an act of hypocrisy and violence. You may have to think about it for a while, but I am sure you can discover your own.

It is the first experience you ever had of reading a decent poem: 'Oh, somebody else is lonely, too!

Poetry is sentimental to begin with. To write a sentimental poem is an act of redundancy.

Although all poets aspire to be birds, no bird aspires to be a poet.

The words secret and sacred are siblings.

I hated childhood / I hate adulthood / And I love being alive.

I study nature so as not to do foolish things.

Yes, the mistrust of poetry has a long history, for a variety of reasons, but they all come down to sentiment and invention over fact and truth. Figurative language is suspicious.

There’s a difference between being alone and being lonely. Writers know that. I have never met a writer who does not crave to be alone. We have to be alone to do what we do.

All of the heroes you see falling down were filmed trying to stand up.

If we knew the value of suffering, we would ask for it.

I remember being so young I thought all artists were famous.

I like to read because it kills me.

The industrial world destroys nature not because it doesn’t love it but because it is not afraid of it.

My happiness is marred only by my failure to attain it.

Metaphor is not, and never has been, a mere literary term. It is an event.

[On filling out a grant application:] I seek an extended period of time, free from all distractions, so that I might be free to be distracted.

It is not what a poem says with its mouth, it’s what a poem does with its eyes.

I have become an orchidwashed in on the salt white beach.Memory, what can I make of it nowthat might please you-this life, already wastedand still strewn with miracles?