Quotes by Mary Ruefle

About Mary Ruefle:

Mary Ruefle is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She has published eleven collections of poetry, most recently, Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013). Ruefle's debut collection of prose, The Most Of It, appeared in 2008 and her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, was published in August 2012, both published by Wave Books.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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 youn...

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,

Mary Ruefle

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 ap...

Mary Ruefle

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 g...

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

I study nature so as not to do foolish things.

Mary Ruefle

Author Bio

  • NameMary Ruefle
  • DescriptionPoet, essayist, professor
  • Born1952
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship