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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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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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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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I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
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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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Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness
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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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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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 fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
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The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.
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The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.
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I hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.
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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
Muriel Rukeyser
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Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.
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 three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone
Muriel Rukeyser
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Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
Muriel Rukeyser
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The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser
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There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
Muriel Rukeyser