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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

More quotes by Muriel Rukeyser

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Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
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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
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The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.
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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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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.
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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the truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same.
Muriel Rukeyser
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The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
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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If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.
Muriel Rukeyser
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The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Women in drudgery knew They must be one of four: Whores, artists, saints, and wives. There are composite lives that women always live
Muriel Rukeyser
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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.
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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I hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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?
Muriel Rukeyser
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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.
Muriel Rukeyser
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I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
Muriel Rukeyser
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I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
Muriel Rukeyser