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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
Poetry
Feeling
Feelings
Truth
Approach

More quotes by Muriel Rukeyser

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Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.
Muriel Rukeyser
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I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
Muriel Rukeyser
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Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge.
Muriel Rukeyser
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I hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.
Muriel Rukeyser
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What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone
Muriel Rukeyser
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One writes in order to feel.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Reality is the completion of experience.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Flight is intolerable contradiction.
Muriel Rukeyser
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What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
Muriel Rukeyser
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The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.
Muriel Rukeyser
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A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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