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Muriel Rukeyser
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“Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry ...”
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“Weave grasses for their childhood : who will never see / love or disaster or take sides against decay ...”
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“Believe that we bloom upon this stalk of time; / and in this expansion, time too grows for us / richer and richer towards infinity.”
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“Call off your black dog, death, / it cannot bark me down: / I'll travel past these wounds / and speak another breath!”
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“Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.”
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“To be a Jew in the twentieth century / Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse, / Wishing to be invisible, you choose / Death of the spirit, the stone insanity.”
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“Rage for the world as it is / but for what it may be / more love now than last year ...”
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“Dreams the sources of action, the meeting and the end, / a resting-place among the flight of things.”
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“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.”
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“The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.”
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“Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.”
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“The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.”
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“... Hollywood works continually to keep its standard of contempt for the audience.”
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“One writes in order to feel ...”
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“... the truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same.”
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“Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know ...”
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“There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.”
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“Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge ...”
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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.”
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“... 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.”
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“The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.”
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“... reality is the completion of experience ...”
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“The music of difference, all alive. / The founders and this people, who set in diversity / The base of our living.”
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“The journey is my home.”
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“Peace the great meaning has not been defined. / When we say peace as a word, war / As a flare of fire leaps across our eyes.”
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“You are here, Mother, and you are / Dead, and here is your gift: my life which is my home.”
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“... I am in the world / to change the world ...”
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“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.”
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“The universe is made of stories, / not of atoms.”
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“'When you say Man,' said Oedipus, 'you include women / too. Everyone knows that.' She said, 'That's what / you think.'”
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“... I come alone / To you, Mother, I walk, making our poems.”
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“Many of us speak, / we do teach each other, we do act through our fears.”
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“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, U.S. poet, biographer, translator
(1913 - 1980)