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Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.

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
Beware
Sacrifice
Talk

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There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
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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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Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
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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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Flight is intolerable contradiction.
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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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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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the truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same.
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What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone
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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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Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.
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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 world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.
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The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
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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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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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A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.
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Reality is the completion of experience.
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Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness
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