Out of silence: selected poems
A source page for quotes linked to Muriel Rukeyser.
“I hear the singing of the lives of women. The clear mystery, the offering, and the pride.”
“These men breathe hard but the committee has a voice of steel.”
“...only one man lived who could understand Gibbs's papers. That was Maxwell, and now he is dead.”
“We are against war and the sources of war. We are for poetry and the sources of poetry.”
“Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.”
“I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane.”
“Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.”
“There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.”
“Hollywood works continually to keep its standard of contempt for the audience.”
“the truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same.”
“One writes in order to feel.”
“The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.”
“Try to live as if there were a God”
“I will try to be non-violent one more day this morning, waking the world away in the violent day.”
“The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.”
“I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile?”
“Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.”
“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.”