Top 80 Rukeyser Quotes
#1. Poet' had always sounded like a profession to me, or a talent. But the dead American [Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry] made it sound like a faith.
Ariel Gore
#2. Slowly I would get to pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
Muriel Rukeyser
#5. When I am dead, even then,
I will still love you, I will wait in these poems,
When I am dead, even then
I am still listening to you.
Muriel Rukeyser
#7. The universe is not made of atoms; it's made of stories.
Muriel Rukeyser
#8. 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?
Muriel Rukeyser
#9. 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
#10. The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.
Muriel Rukeyser
#11. I hope for quick, fluent copy and memorable pictures. The words would not 'describe' the pictures; the pictures would not 'illustrate' the words. Together, they would carry a stamp and tell a story.
Muriel Rukeyser
#12. The actual world, not some fantastic structure that has nothing to do with reality, must provide the material for modern poetry.
Muriel Rukeyser
#13. There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
Muriel Rukeyser
#14. The town of Gauley Bridge stands as a pattern for all those places where people are linked even in the middle of their suffering, where people fight against an evil condition so that other people need not go through the same fight.
Muriel Rukeyser
#15. 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.
Muriel Rukeyser
#16. We are against war and the sources of war.
We are for poetry and the sources of poetry.
Muriel Rukeyser
#17. Editors have grown timid ... a brave advance is almost inevitably followed by quick back-tracking, generally by dilution and debasement of the original intention.
Muriel Rukeyser
#19. Their faces said : This is your home; and I .
I never come home, I never go away.
And they all answered : Stay.
Muriel Rukeyser
#20. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
Muriel Rukeyser
#21. I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
Muriel Rukeyser
#22. Local images have one kind of reality. 'U.S. 1' will, I hope, have that kind and another, too. Poetry can extend the document.
Muriel Rukeyser
#23. What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone
Muriel Rukeyser
#24. The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.
Muriel Rukeyser
#26. I hear the singing of the lives of women. The clear mystery, the offering, and the pride.
Muriel Rukeyser
#28. 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
#29. 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.
Muriel Rukeyser
#30. Only one man lived who could understand Gibbs's papers. That was Maxwell, and now he is dead.
Muriel Rukeyser
#31. 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
#33. In all the cities of this year
I have longed for the other city.
Muriel Rukeyser
#34. Hollywood works continually to keep its standard of contempt for the audience.
Muriel Rukeyser
#35. Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know ...
Muriel Rukeyser
#36. In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty.
Muriel Rukeyser
#37. The truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same.
Muriel Rukeyser
#38. Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.
Muriel Rukeyser
#39. We hear the saints saying: Our brother the world. We hear the revolutionaries: Dare we win?
Muriel Rukeyser
#40. 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.
Muriel Rukeyser
#41. The best way to keep money in perspective is to have some.
Louis Rukeyser
#42. In Wall Street, the only thing that's hard to explain is next week.
Louis Rukeyser
#43. Roaming the world as a foreign correspondent for more than a decade, I was able to observe how a variety of vastly different nations organized themselves economically. The inescapable conclusion was that no politician anywhere on the planet has ever actually created a rupee's worth of prosperity.
Louis Rukeyser
#44. A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.
Muriel Rukeyser
#45. 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
#46. The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.
Muriel Rukeyser
#48. 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
#49. Wherever
we walk
we will make
Wherever
we protest
we will go planting
Make poems
seed grass
feed a child growing
build a house
Whatever we stand against
We will stand feeding and seeding
Wherever
I walk
I will make
Muriel Rukeyser
#50. 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
#52. I learned that I had been brought up as a protected, blindfolded daughter.
Muriel Rukeyser
#53. The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.
Muriel Rukeyser
#54. I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane.
Muriel Rukeyser
#55. I will try to be non-violent
one more day
this morning, waking the world away
in the violent day.
Muriel Rukeyser
#58. I think there is choice possible at any moment to us, 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
Muriel Rukeyser
#59. One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.
Muriel Rukeyser
#61. Fifteen cents of every twenty-cent stamp goes for storage.
Louis Rukeyser
#62. 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
#64. I never make a prediction that can be proved wrong within 24 hours.
Louis Rukeyser
#65. What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.
Muriel Rukeyser
#66. The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
Muriel Rukeyser
#71. Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge ...
Muriel Rukeyser
#72. 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
#73. 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. There is no such thing as bad art.
Muriel Rukeyser
#74. Dreams are the sources of action, the meeting and the end, a resting place among the flight of things.
Muriel Rukeyser
#76. 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.
Muriel Rukeyser
#77. 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
#79. I should like to use another word: 'audience' or 'reader' or 'listener' seems inadequate. I suggest the old word 'witness,' which includes the act of seeing and knowing by personal experience, as well as the act of giving evidence.
Muriel Rukeyser
#80. 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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