Words matter. These are the best Muriel Rukeyser Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.
The journey is my home.
Editors have grown timid… a brave advance is almost inevitably followed by quick back-tracking, generally by dilution and debasement of the original intention.
Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.
I think there is choice possible to us at any moment, as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice, and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
I hope for quick, fluent copy and memorable pictures. The words would not ‘describe’ the pictures; the pictures would not ‘illustrate’ the words. Together, they would carry a stamp and tell a story.
I should like to use another word: ‘audience’ or ‘reader’ or ‘listener’ seems inadequate. I suggest the old word ‘witness,’ which includes the act of seeing and knowing by personal experience, as well as the act of giving evidence.
The actual world, not some fantastic structure that has nothing to do with reality, must provide the material for modern poetry.
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.
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
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.
One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.
A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them. There is no such thing as bad art.
