Muriel Rukeyser Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

Muriel Rukeyser
In this moment when we face horizons and conflicts wider than ever before, we want our resources, the ways of strength. We look again to the human wish, its faiths, the means by which the imagination leads us to surpass ourselves.
If there is a feeling that something has been lost, it may be because much has not yet been used, much is still to be found and begun.
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
I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot

Muriel Rukeyser
'When you say Man,' said Oedipus, 'you include women
too. Everyone knows that.' She said, 'That's what
you think.'

Muriel Rukeyser
These are roads to take when you think of your country
and interested bring down the maps again,
phoning the statistician, asking the dear friend,
reading the papers with morning inquiry.

Muriel Rukeyser
In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all of our need, our need for each other and our need for our selves. We call up, with all the strength of summoning we have, our fullness. And then we turn; for it is a turning that we have prepared; and act.

Muriel Rukeyser
The poetic image is not a static thing. It lives in time, as does the poem. Unless it is the first image of the poem, it has already been prepared for by other images; and it prepares us for further images and rhythms to come. Even if it is the first image of the poem, the establishment of the rhythm prepares us — musically — for the music of the image. And if its first word begins the poem, it has the role of putting into motion all the course of images and music of the entire work, with nothing to refer to, except perhaps a title.

Muriel Rukeyser
Many of us speak,
we do teach each other, we do act through our fears.

Muriel Rukeyser
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
Experience taken into the body, breathed-in, so that reality is the completion of experience, and poetry is what is produced. And life is what is produced.
To stand against the idea of the fallen world, a powerful and destructive idea overshadowing Western poetry. In that sense, there is no lost Eden, and God is the future. The child walled-up in our life can be given his growth. In this growth is our security.

Muriel Rukeyser
Fly down, Death: Call me:
I have become a lost name.

Muriel Rukeyser
The music of difference, all alive.
The founders and this people, who set in diversity
The base of our living.

Muriel Rukeyser
You are here, Mother, and you are
Dead, and here is your gift: my life which is my home.

Muriel Rukeyser
Believe that we bloom upon this stalk of time;
and in this expansion, time too grows for us
richer and richer towards infinity.

Muriel Rukeyser
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.
In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all our need, our need for each other and our need for our selves. We call up, with all the strength of summoning we have, our fullness.

Muriel Rukeyser
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

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

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

Muriel Rukeyser
Here is your road, tying you to its meanings: gorge, boulder, precipice.
Telescoped down, the hard and stone-green river
cutting fast and direct into the town.

Muriel Rukeyser
Weave grasses for their childhood : who will never see
love or disaster or take sides against decay.

Muriel Rukeyser
Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.

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

Muriel Rukeyser
The whole and fertile spirit as guarantee
For every human freedom, suffering to be free,
Daring to live for the impossible.

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

Muriel Rukeyser
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
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
Call off your black dog, death,
it cannot bark me down:
I'll travel past these wounds
and speak another breath!

Muriel Rukeyser
How shall we venture home?
How shall we tell each other of the poet?
How can we meet the judgment on the poet,
or his execution? How shall we free him? How shall we speak to the infant beginning to run?
All those beginning to run?

Muriel Rukeyser
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.

Muriel Rukeyser