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in the beginning William Shakespeare was a baby, and knew absolutely nothing. He couldn't even speak.

Mary Ruefle

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Mary Ruefle
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: April 16
Essayist
Poet
Writer
Allegheny County
Pennsylvania
Baby
Knew
Speak
Nothing
William
Even
Shakespeare
Absolutely
Beginning
Couldn

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If we knew the value of suffering, we would ask for it.
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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.
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Irreverence is a way of playing hooky and remaining present at the same time.
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My happiness is marred only by my failure to attain it.
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In the end I would rather wonder than know
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We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love—a connection between things.
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Art has always been aware of itself as art.
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In life, the number of beginnings is exactly equal to the number of endings ... In poetry, the number of beginnings so far exceeds the number of endings that we cannot even conceive of it.
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The industrial world destroys nature not because it doesn’t love it but because it is not afraid of it.
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A poem is a finished work of the mind, it is not the work of a finished mind.
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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.
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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.
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Words have a love for each other, a desire that culminates in poetry.
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People, the people we really love, where did they come from? What did we do to deserve them?
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Poetry is sentimental to begin with. To write a sentimental poem is an act of redundancy.
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The words secret and sacred are siblings.
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In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?
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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.
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