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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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Muriel Rukeyser
Age: 66 †
Born: 1913
Born: December 15
Died: 1980
Died: February 12
Author
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Relation
Taught
Make
Never
Despise
Tolerance

More quotes by 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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The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.
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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 truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same.
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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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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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There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
Muriel Rukeyser
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What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone
Muriel Rukeyser
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I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
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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?
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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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Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.
Muriel Rukeyser
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My lifetime listens to yours.
Muriel Rukeyser
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The journey is my home.
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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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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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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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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Reality is the completion of experience.
Muriel Rukeyser