Muriel Rukeyser Quotes

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole.

As we live our truths, we will communicate across all barriers, speaking for the sources of peace. Peace that is not lack of war, but fierce and positive.

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.

The journey is my home.

The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.

If we look long enough and hard enough ... we will begin to see the connections that bind us together, and when we recognize those connections, we will begin to change the world.

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

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.

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

Reality is the completion of experience.

Never to despise in myself what I have been taught to despise. Nor to despise the other. Not to despise the it. To make this relation with the it: to know that I am it.

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.

A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them.

The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.

The world is made up of Stories, not Atoms.

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

My lifetime listens to yours.

Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.

In time of crisis, we summon up our strength. Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: it depends on the long preparation of the self to be used.

Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.

Exchange is creation.

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

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

What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone

Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness

How can I look back and not speak of the stupid learning about birth? Of the stupid learning that people make love, and how it seemed the reason for all things, the intimacy of my wondering, the illumination that to an adolescent was the cause for life around me, the reason why the unhappy people I knew did not kill themselves?

Flight is intolerable contradiction.

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.

Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.

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.

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

All the poems of our lives are not yet made.

The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.

the truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same.

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

One writes in order to feel.

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.

Slowly I would get to pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.

Hollywood works continually to keep its standard of contempt for the audience.

I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot

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.

There has been in our time a lack of reliance on language and a lack of experimentation which are frightening to anyone who sees them as symptoms. We know the phenomenon of stage-fright: it holds the player shivering, incapable of speech or action. Perhaps there is an audience-fright which the play can feel, which leaves him with these incapacities.

Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has - the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge - infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.

I am haunted by interrupted acts, introspective as a leper, enchanted by a repulsive clew, a gross and fugitive movement of the limbs. Is this the love that shook the lights to flame?

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.

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

I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.