Mary Ruefle Quotes - Page 2

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

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

When I first encountered the poems of Jon Woodward, I was stunned into the state that is my life's joy-I was in the presence of the inimitable. Uncanny Valley extends that experience-almost into another dimension. These apocalyptic, pixilated poems forge a mythology of our ravaged culture, one that might have been written in the future. If you want poetry to give you a persimmon on a plate, look elsewhere; if you want to know what happens when seven trees fall on the highway and the story is told by a stutterer, this is the book, and it could only have been written by Woodward.

Polar fleece is a plush, spongy, totally artificial material that weighs nothing and conveys no quality of warmth or coolness; in fact, you can wear it in the most bitter weather or in the hottest heat. Polar fleece looks neither flimsy and light nor hearty and warm. It has no historical, cultural, or physical association with a place, a season, a society, or any living thing. It is the first existential fabric - eminentaly useful, meaningless, dissociated and weird.

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

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.

I study nature so as not to do foolish things.

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

Every time it starts to snow, I would like to have sex.

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

I like to read because it kills me.

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.

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

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

I remember I was a child, and when I grew up I was a poet. It all happened at sixty miles an hour and on days when the clock stopped and all of humanity fit into a little chapel, into a pinecone, a shot of ouzo, a snail's shell, a piece of soggy rye on the pavement.

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.

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