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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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Muriel Rukeyser
Age: 66 †
Born: 1913
Born: December 15
Died: 1980
Died: February 12
Author
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Four
Whores
Lives
Drudgery
Artist
Wives
Women
Saints
Live
Saint
Must
Artists
Always
Wife
Composite
Knew
Composites

More quotes by 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.
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Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge.
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Flight is intolerable contradiction.
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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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the truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same.
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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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Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.
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I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
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Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.
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The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
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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.
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Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.
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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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My lifetime listens to yours.
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There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
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Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.
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Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness
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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Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
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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