Muriel Rukeyser Quotes

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

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.

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.

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.

The journey is my home.

The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.

If we look long enough and hard enough ... we will begin to see the connections that bind us together, and when we recognize those connections, we will begin to change the world.

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

Reality is the completion of experience.

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.

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.

The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.

The world is made up of Stories, not Atoms.

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.

My lifetime listens to yours.

I hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.

Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness

Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.

Exchange is creation.

Dreams are the sources of action, the meeting and the end, a resting place among the flight of things.

What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone

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.

All the poems of our lives are not yet made.

Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.

dogma and shrinking from the external world are at one limit of the range of belief. At the other are science and poetry and, indeed, reality.

Flight is intolerable contradiction.

The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.

The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.

The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.

the truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same.

Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.

A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.

I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot

Try to live as if there were a God

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.

We sit here, very different each from the other, until the passion arrives to give us our equality, to make us part of the play, to make the play part of us.

Hollywood works continually to keep its standard of contempt for the audience.

Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.

I am haunted by interrupted acts, introspective as a leper, enchanted by a repulsive clew, a gross and fugitive movement of the limbs. Is this the love that shook the lights to flame?

Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge.

I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane.

There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.

I will try to be non-violent one more day this morning, waking the world away in the violent day.

Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.

I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile?

I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.

One writes in order to feel.

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?The world would split open.