Muriel Rukeyser quotes

Muriel Rukeyser was an American poet and political activist known for her passionate engagement with social justice issues. Her poetry often explored themes such as equality, feminism, and the power of the written word to effect change. She remains an influential figure in American literature and progressive thought. Here are 35 of her quotes:

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.

Muriel Rukeyser

breathe in experience breathe out poetry.

Muriel Rukeyser

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.

Muriel Rukeyser

Exchange is creation.

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

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

Muriel Rukeyser

All the poems of our lives are not yet made.

Muriel Rukeyser

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

Muriel Rukeyser

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

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

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.

Muriel Rukeyser

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.

Muriel Rukeyser

Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness.

Muriel Rukeyser

These are roads to take when you think of your country and interested bring down the maps again, phoning the statistician, asking the dear friend, reading the papers with morning inquiry.

Muriel Rukeyser

What do you want - a cliff over a city? A foreland, sloped to sea and overgrown with roses? These people live here.

Muriel Rukeyser

To be a Jew in the twentieth century Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse, Wishing to be invisible, you choose Death of the spirit, the stone insanity. Accepting, take full life. Full agonies: Your evening deep in labyrinthine blood Of those who resist, fail, and resist: and God Reduced to a hostage among hostages. The gift is torment.

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

How shall we venture home? How shall we tell each other of the poet? How can we meet the judgment on the poet, or his execution? How shall we free him? How shall we speak to the infant beginning to run? All those beginning to run?

Muriel Rukeyser

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

Muriel Rukeyser

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

The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.

Muriel Rukeyser

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.

Muriel Rukeyser