Top 40 Mary Ruefle Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love – a connection between things.”

— Mary Ruefle

3. “If we knew the value of suffering, we would ask for it.”

— Mary Ruefle

4. “The words secret and sacred are siblings.”

— Mary Ruefle

5. “A poem is a finished work of the mind, it is not the work of a finished mind.”

— Mary Ruefle

6. “I study nature so as not to do foolish things.”

— Mary Ruefle

7. “Hands are unbearably beautiful. They hold on to things. They let things go.”

— Mary Ruefle

8. “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

9. “In the end I would rather wonder than know.”

— Mary Ruefle

10. “Metaphor is not, and never has been, a mere literary term. It is an event.”

— Mary Ruefle

11. “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.”

— Mary Ruefle

12. “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.”

— Mary Ruefle

13. “Irreverence is a way of playing hooky and remaining present at the same time.”

— Mary Ruefle

14. “In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?”

— Mary Ruefle

15. “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

16. “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.”

— Mary Ruefle

17. “My happiness is marred only by my failure to attain it.”

— Mary Ruefle

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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.”

— Mary Ruefle

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

— Mary Ruefle

22. “Poetry is sentimental to begin with. To write a sentimental poem is an act of redundancy.”

— Mary Ruefle

23. “Someone reading a book is a sign of order in the world.”

— Mary Ruefle

24. “The industrial world destroys nature not because it doesn’t love it but because it is not afraid of it.”

— Mary Ruefle

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

— Mary Ruefle

26. “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

27. “People, the people we really love, where did they come from? What did we do to deserve them?”

— Mary Ruefle

28. “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.”

— Mary Ruefle

29. “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

30. “It is not what a poem says with its mouth, it’s what a poem does with its eyes.”

— Mary Ruefle

31. “Although all poets aspire to be birds, no bird aspires to be a poet.”

— Mary Ruefle

32. “I remember being so young I thought all artists were famous.”

— Mary Ruefle

33. “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

34. “Something unpronounceable followed by a long silence points out my life is becoming a landscape.”

— Mary Ruefle

35. “Art has always been aware of itself as art.”

— Mary Ruefle

36. “It is sad, is it not, that no one today displays an interest in the art of shrunken heads. Men, women, and children walk on the streets, they cross fields and enter forests, they run along the edges of oceans, but none of them, to the best of my knowledge, are thinking about shrunken heads.”

— Mary Ruefle

37. “Real things are made things. Are you a real person, or did your parents make you up? Is that a real mountain or did the forces of the universe make it up? Is the virtual reality of the Internet real or did imaginative people like Steve Jobs make it up?”

— Mary Ruefle

38. “And who among us is not neurotic, and has never complained that they are not understood? Why did you come here, to this place, if not in the hope of being understood, of being in some small way comprehended by your peers, and embraced by them in a fellowship of shared secrets? I don’t know about you, but I just want to be held.”

— Mary Ruefle

39. “I like to read because it kills me.”

— Mary Ruefle

40. “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