"A poem is a finished work of the mind, it is not the work of a finished mind."

--

Source : Mary Ruefle (2012). “Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures”, p.222, Wave Books

Mary Ruefle

“In a scene [where the improvisers must interact] without the letter S, the audience is waiting for you to lose - so they can laugh at you. Don't try to win.”
“I was, if you like, a successful schoolboy in that I had a degree of talent in all the required things that make you a success at school.”
“We spend too much time wondering what others may have thought about our outfit or the comment we made in the small group meeting. We see opportunities to testify about Christ, but we avoid them. We are more concerned about looking stupid (a fear of people) than we are about acting sinfully (fear of the Lord).”
“I now see how owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.”
“Poetry and preaching do not go well together; when the preacher mounts the pulpit the poet usually goes away.”
“Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.”
“[The scientist] believes passionately in facts, in measured facts. He believes there are no bad facts, that all facts are good facts, though they may be facts about bad things, and his intellectual satisfaction can come only from the acquisition of accurately known facts, from their organization into a body of knowledge, in which the inter-relationship of the measured facts is the dominant consideration.”
“For underground metaphors, you can scrape an inch below the turf. For what it's worth, my style's been developed in the core of the Earth. The exhale's volcanic, the inhale is seismic...”

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