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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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I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
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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 process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.
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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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A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.
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There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
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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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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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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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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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Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.
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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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The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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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I hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.
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Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
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One writes in order to feel.
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the truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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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My lifetime listens to yours.
Muriel Rukeyser