Muriel Rukeyser Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Try to live as if there were a God

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

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.

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

Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.

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.

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

Exchange is creation.

Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.

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

The world is made up of Stories, not Atoms.

All the poems of our lives are not yet made.

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

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

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

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

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.

Flight is intolerable contradiction.