Mary Ruefle > Quotes

“I like to read because
it kills me.”
― Mary Ruefle

“People, the people we really love, where did they come from? What did we do to deserve them?”
― Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

“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, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

“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, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

“Hands are unbearably beautiful. They hold on to things. They let things go.”
― Mary Ruefle

“We are all one question and the best answer seems to be love--a connection between things.”
― Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

“Something unpronounceable
followed by a long silence
points out my life
is becoming a landscape.”
― Mary Ruefle, The Adamant: Poems

“I study nature so as not to do foolish things.”
― 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

“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

“My happiness is marred only by my failure to attain it.”
― Mary Ruefle, Trances of the Blast

“The moon occurs more frequently than the sun as an image in lyric poetry. There is a greater contrast between the moon and the night sky than there is between the sun and the daytime sky. And this contrast is more conducive to sorrow, which always separates or isolates itself, than it is to happiness, which always joins or blends. And to stand face-to-face with the sun is preposterous -- it would blind you. The moon has no light of its own; our apprehension of it is but a reflection of the sun. And some believe artists reflect the creative powers of some original impulse too great to name. The moon is the incunabulum of photography, the first photograph, the first stilled moment, the first study in contrasts. Me here -- you there. Between 1969 and 1972, six missions left for the moon and six missions came back. The men who went to the moon who were forever altered without exception all say the same thing -- it was not being on the moon that profoundly affected them as much as it was looking at the earth from the vantage point of the moon. You there -- me here.”
― Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

“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, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

“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, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

“It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator — a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.”
― Mary Ruefle

“Someone reading a book is a sign of order in the world.”
― 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

“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, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

“Although all poets aspire to be birds, no bird aspires to be a poet.”
― Mary Ruefle, The Most of It

“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, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

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

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

“It is not what a poem says with its mouth, it’s what a poem does with its eyes.”
― Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

“The industrial world destroys nature not because it doesn’t love it but because it is not afraid of it.”
― 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

“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, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

“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, The Most of It

“I used to think I wrote because there was something I wanted to say. Then I thought, 'I will continue to write because I have not yet said what I wanted to say'; but I know now I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to.”
― Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

“Attempting to Soar"

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

“Hope wears a strange raincoat
and straps a gun inside.”
― Mary Ruefle, Tristimania