Mary Ruefle Quotes

19 quotes in 288 categories

• Irreverence is a way of playing hooky and remaining present at the same time.
• The industrial world destroys nature not because it doesn’t love it but because it is not afraid of it.
• My happiness is marred only by my failure to attain it.
• 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…
• 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…
• I hated childhood / I hate adulthood / And I love being alive.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.…
• 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…
• If we knew the value of suffering, we would ask for it.
• In the end I would rather wonder than know
• Although all poets aspire to be birds, no bird aspires to be a poet.
• In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?
• We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love—a connection between things.
• Every time it starts to snow, I would like to have sex.
• Something unpronounceable followed by a long silence points out my life is becoming a landscape.
• I study nature so as not to do foolish things.
• I like to read because it kills me.

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