Muriel Rukeyser

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

— Muriel Rukeyser

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

— Muriel Rukeyser

In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for…

— Muriel Rukeyser

All the poems of our lives are not yet made.

— Muriel Rukeyser

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

— Muriel Rukeyser

Women in drudgery knew They must be one of four: Whores, artists, saints, and wives. There are composite lives that women always…

— Muriel Rukeyser

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

— Muriel Rukeyser

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

— Muriel Rukeyser

“We hear the saints saying: Our brother the world. We hear the revolutionaries: Dare we win?”

— Muriel Rukeyser

A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who…

— Muriel Rukeyser

Slowly I would get to pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be…

— Muriel Rukeyser

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

— Muriel Rukeyser

It is the single image, as used in a photograph or a painting - or the frame of a film - to…

— Muriel Rukeyser

Those who speak of our culture as dead or dying have a quarrel with life, and I think they cannot understand its…

— Muriel Rukeyser

A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who…

— Muriel Rukeyser

“I hear the singing of the lives of women. The clear mystery, the offering, and the pride.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

How can I look back and not speak of the stupid learning about birth? Of the stupid learning that people make love,…

— Muriel Rukeyser

I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.

— Muriel Rukeyser

I hope for quick, fluent copy and memorable pictures. The words would not 'describe' the pictures; the pictures would not 'illustrate' the…

— Muriel Rukeyser

The journey is my home.

— 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…

— Muriel Rukeyser

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

— Muriel Rukeyser

Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything…

— Muriel Rukeyser

“...only one man lived who could understand Gibbs 's papers. That was Maxwell , and now he is dead.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

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

— Muriel Rukeyser