Mary Ruefle Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

As I speak, blood is coursing through our bodies. As it moves away from the heart it marches to a 2/4 or 4/4 beat and it's arterial blood, reoxygenated, assertive, active, progressive, optimistic. When it reaches our extremities and turns home
the heart
well, it's nostalgic, venous blood (as in veins), it's tired, wavelike, rising and falling, fighting against gravity and inertia, and it moves to the beat of a waltz, a 3/4 beat, a little homesick now, and full of longing. — Mary Ruefle

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

I like to read because
it kills me. — Mary Ruefle

The teacher asks a question.
You know the answer, you suspect
you are the only one in the classroom
who knows the answer, because the person
in question is yourself, and on that
you are the greatest living authority,
but you don't raise your hand.
You raise the top of your desk
and take out an apple.
You look out the window.
You don't raise your hand and there is
some essential beauty in your fingers,
which aren't even drumming, but lie
flat and peaceful.
The teacher repeats the question.
Outside the window, on an overhanging branch,
a robin is ruffling its feathers
and spring is in the air. — Mary Ruefle

The words secret and sacred are siblings. — Mary Ruefle

I remember being so young I thought all artists were famous. — Mary Ruefle

And when you think about it, poets always want us to be moved by something, until in the end, you begin to suspect a poet is someone who is moved by everything, who just stands in front of the world and weeps and laughs and laughs and weeps (the mysteries, said Aristotle, are the saying of many ridiculous and many serious things). — Mary Ruefle

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

A boy from Brooklyn used to cruise on summer nights.
As soon as he'd hit sixty he'd hold his hand out the window,
cupping it around the wind. He'd been assured
this is exactly how a woman's breast feels when you put
your hand around it and apply a little pressure. Now he knew,
and he loved it. Night after night, again and again, until
the weather grew cold and he had to roll the window up.
For many years afterwards he was perpetually attempting
to soar. One winter's night, holding his wife's breast
in his hand, he closed his eyes and wanted to weep.
He loved her, but it was the wind he imagined now.
As he grew older, he loved the word etcetera and refused
to abbreviate it. He loved sweet white butter. He often
pretended to be playing the organ. On one of his last mornings,
he noticed the shape of his face molded in the pillow.
He shook it out, but the next morning it reappeared. — Mary Ruefle

Art has always been aware of itself as art. — Mary Ruefle

And who among us is not neurotic, and has never complained that they are not understood? Why did you come here, to this place, if not in the hope of being understood, of being in some small way comprehended by your peers, and embraced by them in a fellowship of shared secrets? I don't know about you, but I just want to be held. — Mary Ruefle

I hated childhood / I hate adulthood / And I love being alive. — Mary Ruefle

I study nature so as not to do foolish things. — Mary Ruefle

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Mary Ruefle

If you were very, very small, smaller than a leprechaun, smaller than a gnome or a fairy, and you lived in a vagina, every time a penis came in there would be a natural disaster. Your dishes would fall out of the cupboards and break and the furniture slide all the way to the other side of the room. It would take a long time to clean up afterwards. — Mary Ruefle

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

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. — Mary Ruefle

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

In the end I would rather wonder than know — Mary Ruefle

I do not think I really have anything to say about poetry other than remarking that it is a wandering little drift of unidentified sound, and trying to say more reminds me of following the sound of a thrush into the woods on a summer's eve - if you persist in following the thrush it will only recede deeper and deeper into the woods; you will never actually see the thrush (the hermit thrush is especially shy), but I suppose listening is a kind of knowledge, or as close as one can come. (viii) — Mary Ruefle

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

[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

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. — Mary Ruefle

Hope wears a strange raincoat
and straps a gun inside. — Mary Ruefle

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

The industrial world destroys nature not because it doesn't love it but because it is not afraid of it. — Mary Ruefle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the beginning William Shakespeare was a baby, and knew absolutely nothing. He couldn't even speak. — Mary Ruefle

It is not what a poem says with its mouth, it's what a poem does with its eyes. — Mary Ruefle

For years the tears fell
without touching the ground.
On this night they hit the floor. — Mary Ruefle

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

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

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

Sent to the Monk"

Night falls
and the empty intimacy of the whole world
fills my heart to frothing.
The past has trudged to this one spot
and falls into the stream,
its flashlight in its mouth.
Ancient tears beneath the surface
rise and scatter like carp,
while an ivory hairpin floats away
like a loose tooth going back in time.

Columbia Poetry Review. Spring 2014 — Mary Ruefle

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

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

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

Someone reading a book is a sign of order in the world. — Mary Ruefle

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

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

Choice, and all its attendant energy, is a characteristic of youth. It is before one chooses that one feels desire and longing without fulfillment, which gives an edge to any artistic endeavor. Galway Kinnell recently said in an interview that a young poet has so many choices but an old poet must simply endure his chosen life. — Mary Ruefle

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