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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

More quotes by Muriel Rukeyser

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Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness
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Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
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Women in drudgery knew They must be one of four: Whores, artists, saints, and wives. There are composite lives that women always live
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Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
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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.
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The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.
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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.
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The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.
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I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
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Flight is intolerable contradiction.
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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.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling. 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.
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Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.
Muriel Rukeyser
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The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
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One writes in order to feel.
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A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them.
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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.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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