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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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Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.
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The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
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What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone
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Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness
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Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.
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Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.
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Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
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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.
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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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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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The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.
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A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.
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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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Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge.
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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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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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The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
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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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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