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Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.

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
Approach
Poetry
Feeling
Feelings
Truth

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A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.
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Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness
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There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
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The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
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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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Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
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One writes in order to feel.
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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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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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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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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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The journey is my home.
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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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Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.
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Flight is intolerable contradiction.
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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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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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The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.
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