Quotes from Muriel Rukeyser

Their faces said : This is your home; and I . I never come home, I never go away. And they all answered : Stay.

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

And if an essential thing has flown between us, rare intellectual bird of communication, let us seize it quickly : let our preference choose it instead of softer things to screen us each from the other's self : muteness or hesitation, nor petrify live miracle by our indifference.

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

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

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.

breathe in experience breathe out poetry

The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.

Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness

I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.

When I am dead, even then, I will still love you, I will wait in these poems, When I am dead, even then I am still listening to you.

The universe is not made of atoms; it's made of stories.

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

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.

I think there is choice possible at any moment to us, 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

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

What three things can never be done? Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone. The hill of glass, the fatal brilliant plain.

Wherever we walk we will make Wherever we protest we will go planting Make poems seed grass feed a child growing build a house Whatever we stand against We will stand feeding and seeding Wherever I walk I will make

We are against war and the sources of war. We are for poetry and the sources of poetry.

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

American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict....We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope; at another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the idea of perpetual warfare

In all the cities of this year I have longed for the other city.

THEN When I am dead, even then, I will still love you, I will wait in these poems, When I am dead, even then I am still listening to you. I will still be making poems for you out of silence; silence will be falling into that silence, it is building music.

It is growing worse every day. At night "I get up to catch my breath. If I remained "flat on my back I believe I would die.