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What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone

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
Stand
Alone
Forget
Keep
Three
Done
Things
Never
Silent

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One writes in order to feel.
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Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
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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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The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
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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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Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.
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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 journey is my home.
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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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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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Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.
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The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
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Flight is intolerable contradiction.
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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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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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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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What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
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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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I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
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