Quotes from Mary Ruefle

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

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

It is sad, is it not, that no one today displays an interest in the art of shrunken heads. Men, women, and children walk on the streets, they cross fields and enter forests, they run along the edges of oceans, but none of them, to the best of my knowledge, are thinking about shrunken heads.

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.

Stali?my naprzeciwko siebie, zapatrzeni jak wtedy, gdy niespodziewanie spotyka si? jelenia - oboje zastygacie na chwil?, równie zaskoczeni, i to spojrzenie zdaje si? by? pojedynczym, jakby obie strony mia?y te same oczy.

The heart is a small closed space, a symbol or souvenir of the inner life, the secret life, the silent life. It is liable to come apart if you touch it.

Life is much, much more than is necessary and much, much more than any of us can bear, so we erase it or it erases us, we ourselves are an erasure of everything we have forgotten or don't know or haven't experiences, and on our deathbed, even that limited erased 'whole' becomes further diminished...

bright sunlight can also be very sad have you noticed?

I have always believed that I became a writer because in the fifth grade I had a pencil fight with a classmate and a piece of graphite has been lodged in my palm ever since.