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Muriel Rukeyser Quotes - Page 3

All Quotes Poetry Reality War
the truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same.

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

Muriel Rukeyser
Poetry, Form

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.

Muriel Rukeyser
Thinking, Dying, Desire

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.

Muriel Rukeyser
Knowledge, Mean, Civilization
"The Life of Poetry". Book by Muriel Rukeyser. Chapter One: "The Fear of Poetry", 1949.

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

Muriel Rukeyser
Mother, Remember, Poet
Muriel Rukeyser (1994). “Out of Silence: Selected Poems”, p.138, Northwestern University Press

Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.

Muriel Rukeyser
Sacrifice

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.

Muriel Rukeyser
Passion, Play, Giving
"The Life of Poetry". Book by Muriel Rukeyser, p. 126, 1949.

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?

Muriel Rukeyser
Stupid, Illumination, People
"The Life of Poetry". Book by Muriel Rukeyser p. 222, 1949.

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.

Muriel Rukeyser
Distance, Men, Brave
Muriel Rukeyser, Janet E. Kaufman, Anne F. Herzog, Jan Heller Levi (2005). “The collected poems of Muriel Rukeyser”, Univ of Pittsburgh Pr

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

Muriel Rukeyser
Hollywood, Standards, Contempt

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.

Muriel Rukeyser
Player, Speech, Action

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?

Muriel Rukeyser
Flames, Light, Movement
Muriel Rukeyser (1994). “Out of Silence: Selected Poems”, p.54, Northwestern University Press

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