Rukeyser Poetry Quotes & Sayings

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

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

like all other living creatures, I am the descendant of survivors, so the fear in my head is the voice of my ancestors whispering their accumulated wisdom. — David George Haskell

I make progress by having people around me who are smarter than I am and listening to them. And I assume that everyone is smarter about something than I am. — Henry J. Kaiser

When I started to be published I thought about Margaret Bourke-White and the whole journalistic approach to things. I believed I was supposed to catch life going by me - that I wasn't to alter it or tamper with it - that I was just to watch what was going on and report it as best I could. This shoot with John was different. I got involved, and I realized that you can't help but be touched by what goes on in front of you. I no longer believe that there is such a thing as objectivity. — Annie Leibovitz

If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union, yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life. — George Galloway

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

He who spins before the poor, inviting them to do likewise, serves God as no one else does. — Mahatma Gandhi

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

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

Without poetry, religion becomes obscure, false, and malignant; without philosophy, licentious in all wantonness, and lascivious to the point of self-castration. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

The fear of poetry is the fear. — Muriel Rukeyser

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

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

You gotta remember: we're musicians ... we're just crazy people who can't get along sometimes. I've definitely come to the table with my knife in my pocket a couple of times; you know how it is. It's part of being human. Now add fame and money and all that rock and roll craziness to it - we're lucky we don't eat each other in this industry! — Corey Taylor

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

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

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

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

When people criticize me, instead of putting my head down, it gives me energy to do even more. — Zlatan Ibrahimovic

Man is, without doubt, the defacer, the destroyer. But spending at least the last three years in trying to understand the enemy has almost seduced me to his side. — Elizabeth Smart

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

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

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

She watched the moon, whose radiance stained with primrose the purple of the surrounding sky. In England the moon had seemed dead and alien; here she was caught in the shawl of night together with earth and all the other stars. — E. M. Forster

You have to have a certain persona to be a star, you know, and I don't have that. I'm a banana. — Harvey Korman