Muriel Rukeyser
Muriel Rukeyser
Muriel Rukeyserwas an American poet and political activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth15 December 1913
CountryUnited States of America
Muriel Rukeyser quotes about
player speech action
There has been in our time a lack of reliance on language and a lack of experimentation which are frightening to anyone who sees them as symptoms. We know the phenomenon of stage-fright: it holds the player shivering, incapable of speech or action. Perhaps there is an audience-fright which the play can feel, which leaves him with these incapacities.
speak fragile
I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile?
life god trying
Try to live as if there were a God
flames light movement
I am haunted by interrupted acts, introspective as a leper, enchanted by a repulsive clew, a gross and fugitive movement of the limbs. Is this the love that shook the lights to flame?
stories world molecules
The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.
artist wife four
Women in drudgery knew They must be one of four: Whores, artists, saints, and wives. There are composite lives that women always live
rocks blood color
The heavy sensual shoulders, the thighs, the blood-born flesh and earth turning into color, rocks into their crystals, water to sound, fire to form: life flickers uncounted into the supple arms of love.
stupid illumination people
How can I look back and not speak of the stupid learning about birth? Of the stupid learning that people make love, and how it seemed the reason for all things, the intimacy of my wondering, the illumination that to an adolescent was the cause for life around me, the reason why the unhappy people I knew did not kill themselves?
made our-lives
All the poems of our lives are not yet made.
passion play giving
We sit here, very different each from the other, until the passion arrives to give us our equality, to make us part of the play, to make the play part of us.
new-beginnings blessing all-things
Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.
vocabulary work-out silence
I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
flight contradiction
Flight is intolerable contradiction.
three-things done forget
What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone