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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
Artist
Wives
Women
Saints
Live
Saint
Must
Artists
Always
Wife
Composite
Knew
Composites
Four
Whores
Lives
Drudgery

More quotes by 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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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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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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One writes in order to feel.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.
Muriel Rukeyser
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The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
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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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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Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
Muriel Rukeyser
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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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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 world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.
Muriel Rukeyser
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I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
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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Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge.
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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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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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.
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