Muriel Rukeyser

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?

— Muriel Rukeyser

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.

— Muriel Rukeyser

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

— Muriel Rukeyser

These are roads to take when you think of your country reading the papers with morning inquiry.

— Muriel Rukeyser

Here is your road, tying cutting fast and direct into the town.

— Muriel Rukeyser

What do you want — a cliff over a city? These people live here.

— Muriel Rukeyser

This is to be a summary poem of the life of the Atlantic coast of this country, nourished by the communications which run down it. Gauley Bridge is inland, but it was created by theories, systems, and workmen from many coastal sections — factors which are, in the end, not regional or national. Local images have one kind of reality. U.S. 1 will, I hope, have that kind and another too. Poetry can extend the document.

— Muriel Rukeyser

To be a Jew in the twentieth century The gift is torment.

— Muriel Rukeyser

The whole and fertile spirit as guarantee Daring to live for the impossible.

— Muriel Rukeyser

A poem does invite, it does require. What does it invite? A poem invites you to feel. More than that: it invites you to respond. And better than that: a poem invites a total response. This response is total, but it is reached through the emotions. 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.

— Muriel Rukeyser

The meanings of poetry take their growth through the interaction of the images and the music of the poem. The music is not the rhythm, which is a representation of life, alone. The music involves the interplay of the sounds of words, the length of the sequences, the keeping and breaking of rhythms, and the repetition and variation of syllables unrhymed and rhymed. It also involves the play of ideas and images.

— Muriel Rukeyser

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.

— Muriel Rukeyser

We sit here, very different each from the other, until the passion arrives to give us our equality, to make us part of the play, to make the play part of us.

— Muriel Rukeyser

All the poems of our lives are not yet made.

— Muriel Rukeyser

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

— Muriel Rukeyser

Experience taken into the body, breathed-in, so that reality is the completion of experience, and poetry is what is produced. And life is what is produced. To stand against the idea of the fallen world, a powerful and destructive idea overshadowing Western poetry. In that sense, there is no lost Eden, and God is the future. The child walled-up in our life can be given his growth. In this growth is our security.

— Muriel Rukeyser

How can I look back and not speak of the stupid learning about birth? Of the stupid learning that people make love, and how it seemed the reason for all things, the intimacy of my wondering, the illumination that — to an adolescent — was the cause for life around me, the reason why the unhappy people I knew did not kill themselves?

— Muriel Rukeyser

The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

— Muriel Rukeyser

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

— Muriel Rukeyser

Slowly I would get to pen and paper, considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

— Muriel Rukeyser

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other, To let go the means, to wake.

— Muriel Rukeyser

How shall we venture home? All those beginning to run?

— Muriel Rukeyser

O for God's sake underneath.

— Muriel Rukeyser

Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness

— Muriel Rukeyser

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.'

— Muriel Rukeyser

The journey is my home.

— Muriel Rukeyser