Muriel Rukeyser Quotes - Page 2

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• I think there is a choice possible to us at any moment, as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice, and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Fall, Sacrifice, Thinking

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• The 'idea' for the poem, which may come as an image thrown against memory, as a sound of words that sets off a traveling of sound and meaning, as a curve of emotion (a form) plotted by certain crises of events or image or sound, or as a title which evokes a sense of inner relations; this is the first 'surfacing' of the poem. Then a period of stillness may follow.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Memories, Ideas, Curves

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• American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict....We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope; at another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the idea of perpetual warfare

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Ideas, People, Democracy

  Muriel Rukeyser (2004). “Selected Poems”

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• dogma and shrinking from the external world are at one limit of the range of belief. At the other are science and poetry and, indeed, reality.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Reality, Shrinking, World

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• Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Poetry, Possibility, Outrage

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• No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Book, Reading, Want

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• Dreams are the sources of action, the meeting and the end, a resting place among the flight of things.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Dream, Action, Flight

  Muriel Rukeyser (1994). “Out of Silence: Selected Poems”, p.75, Northwestern University Press

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• The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Writing, Self, Order

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• Women in drudgery knew
  They must be one of four:
  Whores, artists, saints, and wives.
  There are composite lives
  that women always live

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Artist, Wife, Saint

  Muriel Rukeyser (1994). “Out of Silence: Selected Poems”, p.58, Northwestern University Press

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• I hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Pride, Offering, Singing

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• Try to live as if there were a God

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Life, God, Trying

  Muriel Rukeyser (1994). “Out of Silence: Selected Poems”, p.54, Northwestern University Press

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• I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile?

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Speak, Fragile

  Muriel Rukeyser (1994). “Out of Silence: Selected Poems”, p.120, Northwestern University Press

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• Exchange is creation.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Creation

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• Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling. A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually - that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too - but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Imagination, Poetry, Feelings

  "The Life of Poetry". Book by Muriel Rukeyser. Chapter One: "The Fear of Poetry", p. 8, 1949.

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• The statement of ideas in a poem may have to do with logic. More profoundly, it may be identified with the emotional progression of the poem, in terms of the music and images, so that the poem is alive throughout. Another, more fundamental statement in poetry, is made through the images themselves those declarations, evocative, exact, and musical, which move through time and are the actions of a poem.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Moving, Emotional, Ideas

  "The Life of Poetry". Book by Muriel Rukeyser, p. 31, 1949.

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• Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Personality, Happens

  Muriel Rukeyser (1994). “Out of Silence: Selected Poems”, p.121, Northwestern University Press

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• The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Molecules, Stories, World

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• The world is made up of Stories, not Atoms.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Atoms, Stories, World

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• All the poems of our lives are not yet made.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Made, Our Lives

  "The Life of Poetry". Book by Muriel Rukeyser, p. 214, 1949.

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• Those who speak of our culture as dead or dying have a quarrel with life, and I think they cannot understand its terms, but must endlessly repeat the projection of their own desires.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Thinking, Dying, Desire

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• I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Morning, War, Insane

  Muriel Rukeyser, Kate Daniels (1992). “Out of silence: selected poems”, Triquarterly Books

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• There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  History, Lost, Buried

  Muriel Rukeyser (2013). “Savage Coast”, p.9, The Feminist Press at CUNY

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• I will try to be non-violent
  one more day
  this morning, waking the world away
  in the violent day.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Morning, Trying, Violence

  Muriel Rukeyser (1994). “Out of Silence: Selected Poems”, p.137, Northwestern University Press

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• Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Body, Language, Punctuation

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• The heavy sensual shoulders, the thighs, the blood-born flesh
  and earth turning into color, rocks into their crystals,
  water to sound, fire to form: life flickers
  uncounted into the supple arms of love.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Blood, Color, Fire

  Muriel Rukeyser (1994). “Out of Silence: Selected Poems”, p.52, Northwestern University Press

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