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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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Muriel Rukeyser
Age: 66 †
Born: 1913
Born: December 15
Died: 1980
Died: February 12
Author
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Stop
Impossible
Word
Reading
Read
Closing
Keep
Poem
Book
Poetry
Make
Wants

More quotes by Muriel Rukeyser

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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.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness
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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There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
Muriel Rukeyser
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One writes in order to feel.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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
Muriel Rukeyser
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Reality is the completion of experience.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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.
Muriel Rukeyser
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The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.
Muriel Rukeyser
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I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
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
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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?
Muriel Rukeyser
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Flight is intolerable contradiction.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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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Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.
Muriel Rukeyser
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The journey is my home.
Muriel Rukeyser
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I hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.
Muriel Rukeyser
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What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
Muriel Rukeyser