Quote

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.

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
Live
Choices
Long
Possible
Beware
Think
Talk
Falls
Thinking
Moment
Sacrifice
Fall
Exist
Away
Choice
Moments
Second
Doe
Rest

More quotes by Muriel Rukeyser

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A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.
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I hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.
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I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
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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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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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Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.
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I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
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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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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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Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.
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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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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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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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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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Reality is the completion of experience.
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?
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Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness
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The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.
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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Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.
Muriel Rukeyser