Muriel Rukeyser Quotes & Sayings

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

The universe is made of stories, not atoms. — Muriel Rukeyser

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

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

The universe is not made of atoms; it's made of stories. — Muriel Rukeyser

The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness. — Muriel Rukeyser

The universe is made up of stories, not atoms. — Muriel Rukeyser

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

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. — Muriel Rukeyser

It is the single image, as used in a photograph or a painting - or the frame of a film - to which words have been added to enlarge the context. The method is not the same as that by which most paintings are named. It is closer in its performance to what dialogue does to a movie, to what the caption does to a good poster. — Muriel Rukeyser

Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has
the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge
infinitely precious, time- resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry. — Muriel Rukeyser

The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories. — Muriel Rukeyser

I learned that I had been brought up as a protected, blindfolded daughter. — Muriel Rukeyser

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

We hear the saints saying: Our brother the world. We hear the revolutionaries: Dare we win? — Muriel Rukeyser

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

Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other. — Muriel Rukeyser

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

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

The advertising men made it clear that there were two ways of looking at ideas in a war against fascism. Those of us who were working on the project believed ideas were to be fought for; the advertising men believed they were to be sold. The audience, those at home in wartime, were not 'citizens' or 'people.' They were 'customers.' — Muriel Rukeyser

One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure. — Muriel Rukeyser

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

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

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

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

There has been in our time a lack of reliance on language and a lack of experimentation which are frightening to anyone who sees them as symptoms. We know the phenomenon of stage-fright: it holds the player shivering, incapable of speech or action. Perhaps there is an audience-fright which the play can feel, which leaves him with these incapacities. — Muriel Rukeyser

The journey is my home. — Muriel Rukeyser

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

The 'idea' for the poem, which may come as an image thrown against memory, as a sound of words that sets off a traveling of sound and meaning, as a curve of emotion (a form) plotted by certain crises of events or image or sound, or as a title which evokes a sense of inner relations; this is the first 'surfacing' of the poem. Then a period of stillness may follow. — Muriel Rukeyser

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

I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile? — Muriel Rukeyser

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

The actual world, not some fantastic structure that has nothing to do with reality, must provide the material for modern poetry. — Muriel Rukeyser

I hear the singing of the lives of women. The clear mystery, the offering, and the pride. — Muriel Rukeyser

Reality is the completion of experience ... — Muriel Rukeyser

Their faces said : This is your home; and I .
I never come home, I never go away.
And they all answered : Stay. — Muriel Rukeyser

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

Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness — Muriel Rukeyser

All the poems of our lives are not yet made. — Muriel Rukeyser

The world is made up of Stories, not Atoms. — Muriel Rukeyser

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

Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know ... — Muriel Rukeyser

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

The fear of poetry is the fear. — Muriel Rukeyser

Lying in the grass
girl and boy
Eating oranges, exchanging kisses
like waves exchanging whiteness.

Lying on the beach
girl and boy.
Eating apples, exchanging kisses
like clouds exchanging whiteness.

Lying underground
girl and boy.
Saying nothing, never kissing
exchanging silence for silence. — Muriel Rukeyser

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

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

In all the cities of this year
I have longed for the other city. — Muriel Rukeyser

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

My lifetime listens to yours. — Muriel Rukeyser

Only one man lived who could understand Gibbs's papers. That was Maxwell, and now he is dead. — Muriel Rukeyser

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

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

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

Flight is intolerable contradiction. — Muriel Rukeyser

Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems. — Muriel Rukeyser

We are against war and the sources of war.
We are for poetry and the sources of poetry. — Muriel Rukeyser

Try to live as if there were a God — Muriel Rukeyser

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

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

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

breathe in experience breathe out poetry — Muriel Rukeyser

THEN

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.
I will still be making poems for you
out of silence;
silence will be falling into that silence,
it is building music. — Muriel Rukeyser

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

The statement of ideas in a poem may have to do with logic . More profoundly, it may be identified with the emotional progression of the poem, in terms of the music and images, so that the poem is alive throughout. Another, more fundamental statement in poetry, is made through the images themselves those declarations, evocative, exact, and musical, which move through time and are the actions of a poem. — Muriel Rukeyser

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

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

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

Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. — Muriel Rukeyser

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

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

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

Willard Gibbs is the type of the imagination at work in the world. His story is that of an opening up which has had its effect on our lives and our thinking; and, it seems to me, it is the emblem of the naked imagination - which is called abstract and impractical, but whose discoveries can be used by anyone who is interested, in whatever 'field' - an imagination which for me, more than that of any other figure in American thought, any poet, or political, or religious figure, stands for imagination at its essential points. — Muriel Rukeyser

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

I am working out the vocabulary of my silence. — Muriel Rukeyser

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

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

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

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

Exchange is creation. — Muriel Rukeyser

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

One writes in order to feel ... — Muriel Rukeyser

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

Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me. — Muriel Rukeyser

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