Meridel Le Sueur Quotes

The body repeats the landscape. They are the source of each other and create each other.

It was the bumble bee and the butterfly who survived, not the dinosaur.

Linear thinking is patriarchal.

The history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed myth of its conquerors.

Hard times ain't quit and we ain't quit.

These are the stories that never, never die, that are carried like seed into a new country, are told to you and me and make in us new and lasting strengths.

Lie in the sun with the child in your flesh shining like a jewel. Dream and sing, pagan, wise in your vitals. Stand still like a fat budding tree, like a stalk of corn athrob and aglisten in the heat. Lie like a mare panting with the dancing feet of colts against her sides. Sleep at night as the spring earth. Walk heavily as a wheat stalk at its full time bending towards the earth waiting for the reaper. Let your life swell downward so you become like a vase, a vessel. Let the unknown child knock and knock against you and rise like a dolphin within.

I am luminous with age.

Human history is work history. The heroes of the people are work heroes.

Memory in America suffers amnesia.

Writing is primarily a sensuous and creative expression of life.

Suddenly many movements are going on within me, many things are happening, there is an almost unbearable sense of sprouting, of bursting encasements, of moving kernels, expanding flesh.

It's not the suffering of birth, death, love that the young reject, but the suffering of endless labor without dream, eating the spare bread in bitterness, being a slave without the security of a slave.

Pears cannot ripen alone. So we ripened together.

What happens in a strike happens not to one person alone.... It is a crisis with meaning and potency for all and prophetic of a future. The elements in crisis are the same, there is a fermentation that is identical. The elements are these: a body of men, women and children, hungry; an organization of feudal employers out to break the back of unionization; and the government Labor Board sent to "negotiate" between this hunger and this greed.

They never die, who have the future in them.

No art can develop until it penetrates deeply into the life of the people.

You can tell by looking at most people that the world remains a stone to them and a closed door.

Each generation must go further than the last or what's the use in it?

The people always know that some of the grain will be good, some of the crop will be saved, some will return and bear the strength of the kernel, that from the bloodiest year some survive to outfox the frost.

Money is only money, beans tonight and steak tomorrow. So long as you can look yourself in the eye.

A good civilization gives the greatest possible scope to the common passions and makes them intelligible among the great number of people.

An abyss seems to have opened between the intellectual cosmopolites of culture and the people, hungry for word and meaning.

To be bound by hungers is a beautiful thing but to be bound by physical hungers only is too low a state for man.

Literature must spring from the deep and submerged humus of our life.