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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.

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
Imagination
Intellectually
Feeling
Seize
Call
Poem
Feelings
Reach
Truth
Approach
Way
Poetry
Emotion
Fine

More quotes by Muriel Rukeyser

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Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
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Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.
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Reality is the completion of experience.
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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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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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I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
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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
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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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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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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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The journey is my home.
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I hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.
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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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The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.
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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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A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.
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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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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