"I get so very tired of having to talk about literature. I didn't begin writing because I wanted to sit in a room and talk about the construction of subjectivity in Wordsworth and Ashbery; I began writing because I had made friends with the dead: they had written to me, in their books, about life on earth and I wanted to write back and say yes, house, bridge, river, hair, no, maybe, never, forever."
Mary Ruefle
in "3511 Zwetajewa" v. Levin Westermann
Matthes & Seitz Verlag Berlin, 2017