41+ Mary Ruefle Quotes On Fear, Imagination And Erasure

Mary Ruefle is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She is known for her playful, humorous, and often surreal work, which often focuses on themes of memory, mortality, and the natural world. She has published twelve collections of poetry, most recently My Private Property (2020). Following is our collection on famous quotes by Mary Ruefle on love, life, fear.

Top 10 Mary Ruefle Quotes

1. A poem is a finished work of the mind, it is not the work of a finished mind.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?
5. 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.
6. Irreverence is a way of playing hooky and remaining present at the same time.
7. Something unpronounceable followed by a long silence points out my life is becoming a landscape.
8. 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.
9. Poetry is sentimental to begin with. To write a sentimental poem is an act of redundancy.
10. All of the heroes you see falling down were filmed trying to stand up.

Mary Ruefle Short Quotes

• 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.
• The words secret and sacred are siblings.
• Art has always been aware of itself as art.
• I remember being so young I thought all artists were famous.
• If we knew the value of suffering, we would ask for it.
• Although all poets aspire to be birds, no bird aspires to be a poet.
• In the end I would rather wonder than know
• Every time it starts to snow, I would like to have sex.
• I like to read because it kills me.

Mary Ruefle Quotes About Love

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

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

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

I hated childhood / I hate adulthood / And I love being alive. — Mary Ruefle

The industrial world destroys nature not because it doesn’t love it but because it is not afraid of it. — Mary Ruefle

Mary Ruefle Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Mary Ruefle

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. — 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

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

I study nature so as not to do foolish things. — Mary Ruefle

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

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

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. — Mary Ruefle

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. — Mary Ruefle

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. — Mary Ruefle

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

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. — Mary Ruefle

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. — Mary Ruefle

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. — Mary Ruefle

[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. — Mary Ruefle

Life Lessons by Mary Ruefle

1. Mary Ruefle's work emphasizes the importance of being open to the unexpected, embracing the unknown, and exploring the depths of our own imaginations.
2. Her work encourages readers to look beyond the surface of things and to recognize the beauty in the small, everyday moments of life.
3. Through her poetry, Mary Ruefle encourages us to take risks, to be creative, and to appreciate the beauty of the world around us.