Muriel Rukeyser quotes

The world is made up of Stories, not Atoms. (Muriel Rukeyser)
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. View quote
Muriel Rukeyser
breathe in experience breathe out poetry. View quote
Muriel Rukeyser
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. View quote
Muriel Rukeyser
Exchange is creation. View quote
Muriel Rukeyser
We sit here, very different each from the other, until the passion arrives to give us our equality, to make us part of the play, to make the play part of us. View quote
Muriel Rukeyser
I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile? View quote
Muriel Rukeyser
All the poems of our lives are not yet made. View quote
Muriel Rukeyser
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open. View quote
Muriel Rukeyser
I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane. View quote
Muriel Rukeyser
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)
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? View quote
Muriel Rukeyser
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. View quote
Muriel Rukeyser
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. View quote
Muriel Rukeyser
Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness. View quote
Muriel Rukeyser
These are roads to take when you think of your country and interested bring down the maps again, phoning the statistician, asking the dear friend, reading the papers with morning inquiry. View quote
Muriel Rukeyser
What do you want - a cliff over a city? A foreland, sloped to sea and overgrown with roses? These people live here. View quote
Muriel Rukeyser
To be a Jew in the twentieth century Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse, Wishing to be invisible, you choose Death of the spirit, the stone insanity. Accepting, take full life. Full agonies: Your evening deep in labyrinthine blood Of those who resist, fail, and resist: and God Reduced to a hostage among hostages. The gift is torment. View quote
Muriel Rukeyser
This is to be a summary poem of the life of the Atlantic coast of this country, nourished by the communications which run down it. Gauley Bridge is inland, but it was created by theories, systems, and workmen from many coastal sections - factors which are, in the end, not regional or national. Local images have one kind of reality. U. S. 1 will, I hope, have that kind and another too. Poetry can extend the document. View quote
Muriel Rukeyser
How shall we venture home? How shall we tell each other of the poet? How can we meet the judgment on the poet, or his execution? How shall we free him? How shall we speak to the infant beginning to run? All those beginning to run? View quote
Muriel Rukeyser
The journey is my home. (Muriel Rukeyser)
If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger. View quote
Muriel Rukeyser
Local images have one kind of reality. 'U.S. 1' will, I hope, have that kind and another, too. Poetry can extend the document. View quote
Muriel Rukeyser
The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness. View quote
Muriel Rukeyser
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. View quote
Muriel Rukeyser