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 apply a little pressure. Now he knew, and he loved it. Night after night, again and again, until the weather grew cold, and he had to roll the window up. For many years afterward he was perpetually attempting to soar. One winter’s night, holding his wife’s breasting his hand, he closed his eyes and wanted to weep. He loved her, but it was the wind he imagined now. As he grew older, he loved the word etcetera and refused to abbreviate it. He loved sweet white butter. He often pretended to be playing the organ. On one of his last mornings, he noticed the shape of his face molded in the pillow. He shook it out, but the next morning it reappeared.

— Mary Ruefle

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 Linnell recently said in an interview that a young poet has so many choices, but an old poet must simply endure his chosen life.

— 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 wasteland still strewn with miracles?

— 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

I study nature so as not to do foolish things.

— Mary Ruefle

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

— 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 greatest reality simulator — a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.

— Mary Ruefle