Top 47 Mary Ruefle Quotes
#1. Irreverence is a way of playing hooky and remaining present at the same time.
Mary Ruefle
#2. I study nature so as not to do foolish things.
Mary Ruefle
#3. An animal of only instinct, Johnny Ferret, has in his actions drama, but no theater; theater requires that you draw a circle around the action and observe it from outside the circle; in other words, self-consciousness is theater.
Mary Ruefle
#4. It is not what a poem says with its mouth, it's what a poem does with its eyes.
Mary Ruefle
#5. 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.
Mary Ruefle
#6. A poem is a finished work of the mind, it is not the work of a finished mind.
Mary Ruefle
#7. The words secret and sacred are siblings.
Mary Ruefle
#8. A poem is a neutrino - mainly nothing - it has no mass and can pass through the earth undetected.
Mary Ruefle
#9. 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.
Mary Ruefle
#10. All of the heroes
you see falling down
were filmed trying to stand up.
Mary Ruefle
#11. 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.
Mary Ruefle
#12. I remember being so young I thought all artists were famous.
Mary Ruefle
#13. In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?
Mary Ruefle
#14. Art has always been aware of itself as art.
Mary Ruefle
#15. The industrial world destroys nature not because it doesn't love it but because it is not afraid of it.
Mary Ruefle
#16. In the beginning William Shakespeare was a baby, and knew absolutely nothing. He couldn't even speak.
Mary Ruefle
#17. Although all poets aspire to be birds, no bird aspires to be a poet.
Mary Ruefle
#18. 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.
Mary Ruefle
#19. 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.
Mary Ruefle
#20. [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.
Mary Ruefle
#21. I hated childhood / I hate adulthood / And I love being alive.
Mary Ruefle
#22. In the end I would rather wonder than know
Mary Ruefle
#23. Hope wears a strange raincoat
and straps a gun inside.
Mary Ruefle
#24. If we knew the value of suffering, we would ask for it.
Mary Ruefle
#25. People, the people we really love, where did they come from? What did we do to deserve them?
Mary Ruefle
#26. We are all one question and the best answer seems to be love
a connection between things.
Mary Ruefle
#27. Poetry is sentimental to begin with. To write a sentimental poem is an act of redundancy.
Mary Ruefle
#28. Every time it starts to snow, I would like to have sex.
Mary Ruefle
#29. After hearts shot through with arrows, we have bunnies followed by a warlike fire in the sky, then ghosts, turkeys to honor more ghosts, and a baby born in a barn who is not yet a ghost but also a ghost, for whom we drag trees inside where they do not belong.
Mary Ruefle
#30. 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.
Mary Ruefle
#31. If there is any irreverence in my own work, I hope it is the irreverence I bear in mistrusting my own sincere self, which then sincerely mistrusts the irreverent me. If there is a bottom to this, I think it is a life's work.
Mary Ruefle
#32. 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.
Mary Ruefle
#33. Words have a love for each other, a desire that culminates in poetry.
Mary Ruefle
#34. For years the tears fell
without touching the ground.
On this night they hit the floor.
Mary Ruefle
#35. 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.
Mary Ruefle
#36. Metaphor is not, and never has been, a mere literary term. It is an event.
Mary Ruefle
#38. 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?
Mary Ruefle
#39. Someone reading a book is a sign of order in the world.
Mary Ruefle
#40. My happiness is marred only by my failure to attain it.
Mary Ruefle
#41. 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.
Mary Ruefle
#42. If your teachers suggest that your poems are sentimental, that is only half of it. Your poems probably need to be even more sentimental. Don't be less of a flower, but could you be more of a stone at the same time?
Mary Ruefle
#43. 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.
Mary Ruefle
#44. 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,
Mary Ruefle
#45. The wasting of time is the most personal, most private, most intimate form of conversation with oneself, as well as with another.
Mary Ruefle
#46. Something unpronounceable followed by a long silence points out my life is becoming a landscape.
Mary Ruefle
#47. It is the first experience you ever had of reading a decent poem: 'Oh, somebody else is lonely, too!
Mary Ruefle
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