Muriel Rukeyser Short Quotes

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The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Muriel Rukeyser