Muriel Rukeyser Quotations

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.

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

The 'idea' for the poem, which may come as an image thrown against memory, as a sound of words that sets off a traveling of sound and meaning, as a curve of emotion (a form) plotted by certain crises of events or image or sound, or as a title which evokes a sense of inner relations; this is the first 'surfacing' of the poem. Then a period of stillness may follow.

Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge ...

Hollywood works continually to keep its standard of contempt for the audience.

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

Slowly I would get to pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

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

Flight is intolerable contradiction.

All the poems of our lives are not yet made.