Eleanor Francis

“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

“Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it. (on the wall of a bedroom at a recovery house for alcoholics and drug addicts)”
― David Foster Wallace

“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

“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, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures