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
Cannot
Terms
Must
Dying
Quarrel
Think
Dead
Endlessly
Thinking
Term
Projection
Life
Desire
Quarrels
Understand
Repeat
Culture
Repeats
Speak
Desires

More quotes by Muriel Rukeyser

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Flight is intolerable contradiction.
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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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What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone
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The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
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The journey is my home.
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There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
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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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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 universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
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Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
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My lifetime listens to yours.
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Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.
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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.
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Reality is the completion of experience.
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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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One writes in order to feel.
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Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
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I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
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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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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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