Mary Ruefle quotes:

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

in the beginning William Shakespeare was a baby, and knew absolutely nothing. He couldn't even speak.

[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.

Art has always been aware of itself as art.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I study nature so as not to do foolish things.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

I like to read because it kills me.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 That is why I read: I want everything to be okay. That's why I read when I was a lonely kid and that's why I read now that I'm a scared adult.

In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?

In the end I would rather wonder than know

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

The words secret and sacred are siblings.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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