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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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Muriel Rukeyser
Age: 66 †
Born: 1913
Born: December 15
Died: 1980
Died: February 12
Author
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Rhythm
Physical
Reader
Language
Punctuation
Body
Rhythms
Indication
Biological
Acknowledge

More quotes by 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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Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness
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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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Flight is intolerable contradiction.
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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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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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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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One writes in order to feel.
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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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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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What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
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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?
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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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I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.
Muriel Rukeyser
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What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone
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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I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
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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Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.
Muriel Rukeyser