Muriel Rukeyser

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

“Local images have one kind of reality. 'U.S. 1' will, I hope, have that kind and another, too. Poetry can extend the document.”

“Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.”

“The town of Gauley Bridge stands as a pattern for all those places where people are linked even in the middle of their suffering, where people fight against an evil condition so that other people need not go through the same fight.”

“The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.”

“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.”

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms!”

“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.”

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

“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.”