Muriel Rukeyser Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

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

Muriel Rukeyser
Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling, and what is the use of truth!
How do we use feeling?
How do we use truth! 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.
If we use the resources we now have, we and the world itself may move in one fullness. Moment to moment, we can grow, if we can bring ourselves to meet the moment with our lives.

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.

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.

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

Muriel Rukeyser
What do you want — a cliff over a city?
A foreland, sloped to sea and overgrown with roses?
These people live here.

Muriel Rukeyser
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.

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

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.

Muriel Rukeyser
Rage for the world as it is
but for what it may be
more love now than last year.

Muriel Rukeyser
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.

Muriel Rukeyser
The meanings of poetry take their growth through the interaction of the images and the music of the poem. The music is not the rhythm, which is a representation of life, alone. The music involves the interplay of the sounds of words, the length of the sequences, the keeping and breaking of rhythms, and the repetition and variation of syllables unrhymed and rhymed. It also involves the play of ideas and images.

Muriel Rukeyser
O for God's sake
they are connected
underneath.

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

Muriel Rukeyser
A poem does invite, it does require. What does it invite? A poem invites you to feel. More than that: it invites you to respond. And better than that: a poem invites a total response.
This response is total, but it is reached through the emotions. 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.

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

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

Muriel Rukeyser
Peace the great meaning has not been defined.
When we say peace as a word, war
As a flare of fire leaps across our eyes.

Muriel Rukeyser
Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.

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

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.

Muriel Rukeyser
There are ways in which poetry reaches the people who, for one reason or another, are walled off from it. Arriving in diluted forms, serving to point up an episode, to give to a climax an intensity that will carry it without adding heaviness, to travel toward the meaning of a work of graphic art, nevertheless poetry does arrive. And in the socially accepted forms, we may see the response and the fear, expressed without reserve, since they are expressed during enjoyment which has all the sanctions of society.
Close to song, poetry reaches us in the music we admit: the radio songs that flood our homes, the juke-boxes, places where we drink and eat, the songs of work for certain occupations, the stage-songs we hear as ticketed audience.

Muriel Rukeyser
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.

Muriel Rukeyser
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

Muriel Rukeyser
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.

Muriel Rukeyser
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.

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

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

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

Muriel Rukeyser