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Meridel Le Sueur

  • ... religion was her theater, her dance, her wine, her song.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • "Corn Village," Salute to Spring ()
  • You can tell by looking at most people that the world remains a stone to them and a closed door.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • "Annunciation" (1927), Salute to Spring ()
  • 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.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • "Annunciation" (1927), Salute to Spring ()
  • 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.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • "Annunciation" (1927), Salute to Spring ()
  • Every generation must go further than the last or what's the use in it?

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • "The Dead in Steel," Salute to Spring ()
  • 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.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • "I Was Marching," Salute to Spring ()
  • Human history is work history. The heroes of the people are work heroes.

  • 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.

  • ... 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.

  • ... the history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed-upon myth of its conquerors.

  • Memory in America suffers amnesia.

  • Money is only money, beans tonight and steak tomorrow. So long as you can look yourself in the eye.

  • I am luminous with age.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • title poem, Rites of Ancient Ripening ()
  • I fall and burst beneath the sacred human tree. / Release my seed and let me fall.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • title poem, Rites of Ancient Ripening ()
  • My prairie people are my home / Bird I return flying to their breasts.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • "Offer Me Refuge," Rites of Ancient Ripening ()
  • My bowl is full of grief / and the wind is up.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • "Let the Bird of Earth Fly!" Rites of Ancient Ripening ()
  • Surround of rainbows / Listen / The rain comes upon us / Restore us.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • "Surround of Rainbows," Rites of Ancient Ripening ()
  • Who has stolen the pump handle key to water, boarded up the source?

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • "Corridos of Love," Rites of Ancient Ripening ()
  • The body repeats the landscape. They are the source of each other and create each other.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • "The Ancient People and the Newly Come," in Chester G. Anderson, ed., Growing Up in Minnesota: Ten Writers Remember Their Childhoods ()
  • Linear thinking is patriarchal.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • in Annie Laurie Gaylor, "Freethinker Meridel Le Sueur," Feminist Connection ()
  • Writing is primarily a sensuous and creative expression of life.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • "Formal 'Education' in Writing" (1935), Harvest Song ()
  • ... growth is not concerned with itself.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • "Formal 'Education' in Writing" (1935), Harvest Song ()
  • A good civilization gives the greatest possible scope to the common passions and makes them intelligible among the great number of people.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • "My Town" (1935), Harvest Song ()
  • 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.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • "The Miracle" (1932), Harvest Song ()
  • To be bound by hungers is a beautiful thing but to be bound by physical hungers only is too low a state for man.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • "Evening in a Lumber Town" (1926), Harvest Song ()
  • Literature must spring from the deep and submerged humus of our life.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • introduction, Ripening ()
  • An abyss seems to have opened between the intellectual cosmopolites of culture and the people, hungry for word and meaning.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • "The Dark of the Time" (1956), Ripening ()
  • No art can develop until it penetrates deeply into the life of the people.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • "The Dark of the Time" (1956), Ripening ()
  • It was the bumble bee and the butterfly who survived, not the dinosaur.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • "Doàn Kêt," Ripening ()
  • In every house there was room for a crazy woman.

    • Meridel Le Sueur,
    • interview ()

Meridel Le Sueur, U.S. writer, poet, historian

(1900 - 1996)