Top 75 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

The journey is my home.

Local images have one kind of reality. 'U.S. 1' will, I hope, have that kind and another, too. Poetry can extend the document.

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

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.'

Editors have grown timid... a brave advance is almost inevitably followed by quick back-tracking, generally by dilution and debasement of the original intention.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.

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

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

I hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.

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.

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

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.

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

Exchange is creation.

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.

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.

I think there is choice possible to us at any moment, 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.

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

I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.

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.

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.

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.

The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.

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.

The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.

Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.

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.

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

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.

Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.

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.

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

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

I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile?

Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.

All the poems of our lives are not yet made.

Try to live as if there were a God

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

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

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.

I think there is a choice possible to us at any moment, 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.

Reality is the completion of experience.

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.

One writes in order to feel.

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.

Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness

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

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.

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.

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

The world is made up of Stories, not Atoms.

My lifetime listens to yours.

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