46 Quotes by Mary Ruefle

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love – a connection between things. This arcane bit of knowledge is respoken everyday into the ears of readers of great books, and also appears to perpetually slip under a carpet, utterly forgotten.

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.