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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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I hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.
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Flight is intolerable contradiction.
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Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.
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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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The journey is my home.
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My lifetime listens to yours.
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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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If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.
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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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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.
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One writes in order to feel.
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Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.
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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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What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
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A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.
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The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
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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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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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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.
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