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I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.

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
Silence
Working
Vocabulary
Chaos

More quotes by Muriel Rukeyser

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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
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My lifetime listens to yours.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Reality is the completion of experience.
Muriel Rukeyser
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The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
Muriel Rukeyser
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The heavy sensual shoulders, the thighs, the blood-born flesh and earth turning into color, rocks into their crystals, water to sound, fire to form: life flickers uncounted into the supple arms of love.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
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.
Muriel Rukeyser
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The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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.
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.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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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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
Muriel Rukeyser
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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.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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.
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.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.
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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Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
Muriel Rukeyser