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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
Done
Things
Never
Silent
Stand
Alone
Forget
Keep
Three

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Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
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I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
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Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
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The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
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Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.
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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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There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
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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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Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness
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Reality is the completion of experience.
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Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.
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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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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.
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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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One writes in order to feel.
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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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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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Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.
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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.
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