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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

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Muriel Rukeyser
Age: 66 †
Born: 1913
Born: December 15
Died: 1980
Died: February 12
Author
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
World
Intolerable
Invented
Hunger
Poetry
Would

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The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.
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Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.
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There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
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I hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.
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The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
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I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
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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?
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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.
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A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.
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What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone
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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.
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Flight is intolerable contradiction.
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The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
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Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.
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Reality is the completion of experience.
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the truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same.
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I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
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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.
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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.
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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.
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