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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the truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same.
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One writes in order to feel.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
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There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
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Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.
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What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
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Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
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My lifetime listens to yours.
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I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
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I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
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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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Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.
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The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
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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