Quotes from 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.'

I will try to be non-violent one more day this morning, waking the world away in the violent day.

I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot

As we live our truths, we will communicate across all barriers, speaking for the sources of peace. Peace that is not lack of war, but fierce and positive.

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 fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.

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.

Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.

There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

It is the single image, as used in a photograph or a painting - or the frame of a film - to which words have been added to enlarge the context. The method is not the same as that by which most paintings are named. It is closer in its performance to what dialogue does to a movie, to what the caption does to a good poster.

I hear the singing of the lives of women. The clear mystery the offering the pride.

dogma and shrinking from the external world are at one limit of the range of belief. At the other are science and poetry and, indeed, reality.

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.

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 learned that I had been brought up as a protected, blindfolded daughter.

The journey is my home.

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.

In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty.

Try to live as if there were a God

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.

Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.

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.

Editors have grown timid... a brave advance is almost inevitably followed by quick back-tracking, generally by dilution and debasement of the original intention.