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Meridel Le Sueur
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“... religion was her theater, her dance, her wine, her song.”
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“You can tell by looking at most people that the world remains a stone to them and a closed door.”
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“Suddenly many movements are going on within me, many things are happening, there is an almost unbearable sense of sprouting, of bursting encasements, of moving kernels, expanding flesh.”
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“Lie in the sun with the child in your flesh shining like a jewel. Dream and sing, pagan, wise in your vitals. Stand still like a fat budding tree, like a stalk of corn athrob and aglisten in the heat. Lie like a mare panting with the dancing feet of colts against her sides. Sleep at night as the spring earth. Walk heavily as a wheat stalk at its full time bending towards the earth waiting for the reaper. Let your life swell downward so you become like a vase, a vessel. Let the unknown child knock and knock against you and rise like a dolphin within.”
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“Every generation must go further than the last or what's the use in it?”
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“Our merchant society has been built upon a huge hypocrisy, a cutthroat competition which sets one man against another and at the same time an ideology mouthing such words as 'Humanity,' 'Truth,' the 'Golden Rule,' and such.”
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“Human history is work history. The heroes of the people are work heroes.”
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“The people always know that some of the grain will be good, some of the crop will be saved, some will return and bear the strength of the kernel, that from the bloodiest year some survive to outfox the frost.”
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“... these are the stories that never, never die, that are carried like seed into a new country, are told to you and me and make in us new and lasting strengths.”
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“... the history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed-upon myth of its conquerors.”
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“Memory in America suffers amnesia.”
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“Money is only money, beans tonight and steak tomorrow. So long as you can look yourself in the eye.”
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“I am luminous with age.”
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“I fall and burst beneath the sacred human tree. / Release my seed and let me fall. ”
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“My prairie people are my home / Bird I return flying to their breasts.”
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“My bowl is full of grief / and the wind is up.”
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“Surround of rainbows / Listen / The rain comes upon us / Restore us.”
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“Who has stolen the pump handle key to water, boarded up the source?”
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“The body repeats the landscape. They are the source of each other and create each other.”
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“Linear thinking is patriarchal.”
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“Writing is primarily a sensuous and creative expression of life.”
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“... growth is not concerned with itself.”
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“A good civilization gives the greatest possible scope to the common passions and makes them intelligible among the great number of people.”
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“Life will go on, hour after hour, day after day. Nothing can stop it, not grief, nor sorrow, nor anguish. It goes on and the living are caught in its time like flies in amber. Despite the neighbors and her husband Ellen Livingston became enriched by her sorrow and her soul ripened like a rich nut encased. Because she took all things, even death and sorrow, she was enriched more than those who rejected these things to save themselves from madness and disaster.”
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“To be bound by hungers is a beautiful thing but to be bound by physical hungers only is too low a state for man.”
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“Literature must spring from the deep and submerged humus of our life.”
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“An abyss seems to have opened between the intellectual cosmopolites of culture and the people, hungry for word and meaning.”
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“No art can develop until it penetrates deeply into the life of the people.”
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“It was the bumble bee and the butterfly who survived, not the dinosaur.”
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“In every house there was room for a crazy woman.”
Meridel Le Sueur, U.S. writer, poet, historian
(1900 - 1996)