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:
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
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
