Quotes from Mary Ruefle

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.

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Art has always been aware of itself as art.

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

I like to read because it kills me.

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

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,

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

I study nature so as not to do foolish things.

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

Hands are unbearably beautiful. They hold on to things. They let things go.