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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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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.
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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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Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.
Muriel Rukeyser
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One writes in order to feel.
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.
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Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.
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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Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
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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Flight is intolerable contradiction.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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.
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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The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.
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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The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge.
Muriel Rukeyser
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What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone
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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A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.
Muriel Rukeyser