Quote

I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.

Muriel Rukeyser

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Muriel Rukeyser
Age: 66 †
Born: 1913
Born: December 15
Died: 1980
Died: February 12
Author
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Vocabulary
Chaos
Silence
Working

More quotes by Muriel Rukeyser

Image
Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
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
Image
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
The journey is my home.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
One writes in order to feel.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
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
Image
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
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
Image
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.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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