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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
Vocabulary
Chaos
Silence
Working

More quotes by Muriel Rukeyser

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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?
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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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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Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness
Muriel Rukeyser
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Flight is intolerable contradiction.
Muriel Rukeyser
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I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
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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There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
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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Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.
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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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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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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The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.
Muriel Rukeyser
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The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Reality is the completion of experience.
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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Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
Muriel Rukeyser