Quote

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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Muriel Rukeyser
Age: 66 †
Born: 1913
Born: December 15
Died: 1980
Died: February 12
Author
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Must
Dying
Quarrel
Think
Dead
Endlessly
Thinking
Term
Projection
Life
Desire
Quarrels
Understand
Repeat
Culture
Repeats
Speak
Desires
Cannot
Terms

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?
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Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.
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My lifetime listens to yours.
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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 hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.
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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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Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness
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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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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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The journey is my home.
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A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.
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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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Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge.
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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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Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.
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Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
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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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the truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same.
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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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