Quote

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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Muriel Rukeyser
Age: 66 †
Born: 1913
Born: December 15
Died: 1980
Died: February 12
Author
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Reason
Stupid
Illumination
Look
Learning
Wondering
Looks
Knew
Intimacy
Make
Wonder
Unhappy
Things
Causes
Seemed
Love
Speak
Kill
Life
Around
Birth
People
Back
Cause
Adolescent

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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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Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.
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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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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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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.
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Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
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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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Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
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Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness
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I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
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Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.
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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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There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
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The journey is my home.
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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 process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.
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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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The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.
Muriel Rukeyser