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

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
Happens
Truth
Split
Would
Splits
Life
Told
World
Happen
Open
Woman

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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.
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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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Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.
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Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.
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I hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.
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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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The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
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The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
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Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness
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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 world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.
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I think there is a choice possible to us at any moment, as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice, and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
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My lifetime listens to yours.
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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.
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There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
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A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.
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I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
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Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge.
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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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