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

More quotes by Muriel Rukeyser

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Reality is the completion of experience.
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Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.
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As we live our truths, we will communicate across all barriers, speaking for the sources of peace. Peace that is not lack of war, but fierce and positive.
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I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
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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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The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.
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Flight is intolerable contradiction.
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There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
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What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone
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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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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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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.
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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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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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The journey is my home.
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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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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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The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
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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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