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Flight is intolerable contradiction.

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
Intolerable
Contradiction
Flight

More quotes by 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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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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Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
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The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.
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Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.
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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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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.
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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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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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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Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.
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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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Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge.
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I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
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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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Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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
Muriel Rukeyser
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I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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.
Muriel Rukeyser
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The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser