Muriel Rukeyser Quotes

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

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

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.

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

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.

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.

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.

A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.

One writes in order to feel.

Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness

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

Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.

The journey is my home.

Reality is the completion of experience.

I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.

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

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

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.

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 '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.

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 sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.