A Quote by Muriel Rukeyser

The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality. — © Muriel Rukeyser
The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
Cut off from direct experience, cut off from our own feelings and sometimes our own sensations, we are only too ready to adopt a viewpoint or perspective that is handed to us, and is not our own.
I think women in our global patriarchal culture are told to shut their body down. And when we don't know why, we start to cut our body off. You cut off your curves. You cut off your breasts. You cut off the curve of your tush. You cut off your sexuality... and it's relegated to the bedroom.
I mean, I could go ahead and cut my head off in the guillotine, and it looks great, ... Well, now you turn on CNN and guys are really getting their heads cut off. ... As insane as our fantasy world gets, it's nowhere near as scary as reality.
We must recognize that the reality of another's fear is not to be estimated by our own attitude toward the object of the fear, but by the attitude of the person who fears. It is the fear, not the object, which is the reality.
Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.
The fact that we have to discuss reality as though there were no reality is an indication of the confusion of our times.
The first indication that we are killing our dreams is lack of time. The second indication of the death of our dreams is certainty. The third indication that our dreams are dead is peace.
Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.
The problem is that this speeded-up life and stress in America causes us to cut off our feelings, so we are out of touch with our reality.
Cut off my head, and singular I am, Cut off my tail, and plural I appear; Although my middle's left, there's nothing there! What is my head cut off? A sounding sea; What is my tail cut off? A rushing river; And in their mingling depths I fearless play, Parent of sweetest sounds, yet mute forever.
Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.
They've destroyed their environment, by and large. They've eliminated most other species on the planet, which is just an indication of their sloppiness and their deadness and their oblivion - but even more so, they've cut themselves off from happiness.
The illusion that mechanical progress means human improvement ... alienates us from our own being and our own reality. It is precisely because we are convinced that our life, as such, is better if we have a better car, a better TV set, better toothpaste, etc., that we condemn and destroy our own reality and the reality of our natural resources. Technology was made for man, not man for technology. In losing touch with being and thus with God, we have fallen into a senseless idolatry of production and consumption for their own sakes.
We have indeed been out in space, but some are under the illusion that we have been off Earth. In reality humans have never been off Earth. We have always been on a piece of Earth in space. We survive only as long as we can breathe the air of Earth, drink its waters, and be nourished by its foods. There is no indication that as humans we will ever live anywhere else in the universe. Place, too, is continuously being transformed but only within its own possibilities.
Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations... With basketball, you can correct your own mistakes, immediately and beautifully, in midair.
The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.
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