Mary Ruefle Quotes

Once I witnessed a windstorm so severe two 100-year-old trees were uprooted on the spot. The next day, walking among the wreckage, I found the friable nests of birds, completely intact and unharmed on the ground. That the featherweight survive the massive, that this reversal of fortune takes place among us — that is what haunts me. I don’t know what it means.

In the end I would rather wonder than know

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

In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again That is why I read: I want everything to be okay. That’s why I read when I was a lonely kid and that’s why I read now that I’m a scared adult.

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.

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

I am convinced that the first lyric poem was written at night, and that the moon was witness to the event and that the event was witness to the moon. For me, the moon has always been the very embodiment of lyric poetry.

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.

Now I will give you a piece of advice. I will tell you something that I absolutely believe you should do, and if you do not do it you will never be a witer. It is a certain truth. When your pencil is dull, sharpen it. And when your pencil is sharp, use it until it is dull again.

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

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.

If you have any idea for a poem, an exact grid of intent, you are on the wrong path, a dead-end alley, at the top of a cliff you haven't even climbed. This is a lesson that can only be learned by trial and error.

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?

[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.

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

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

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.

The words secret and sacred are siblings.

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

Art has always been aware of itself as art.

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

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

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.