Top 40 Muriel Rukeyser Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

Featured in: Storytelling Quotes, Universe Quotes, Imagination Quotes, Quotes About Stories

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

— Muriel Rukeyser

Featured in: Strong Women Quotes, Life Quotes for Women, International Women's Day Quotes

3. “The journey is my home.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

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

— Muriel Rukeyser

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

— Muriel Rukeyser

6. “The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

7. “I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

8. “Try to live as if there were a God.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

9. “One writes in order to feel...”

— Muriel Rukeyser

10. “Dreams are the sources of action, the meeting and the end, a resting place among the flight of things.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

11. “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.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

12. “My lifetime listens to yours.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

13. “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.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

14. “A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

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

— Muriel Rukeyser

16. “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.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

17. “Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

18. “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.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

19. “All the poems of our lives are not yet made.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

20. “Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

21. “Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

22. “The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

23. “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.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

24. “I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile?”

— Muriel Rukeyser

25. “I think there is a 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.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

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

— Muriel Rukeyser

27. “I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

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

— Muriel Rukeyser

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

— Muriel Rukeyser

30. “The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

31. “Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

32. “Flight is intolerable contradiction.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

33. “I hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

34. “Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

35. “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.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

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

— Muriel Rukeyser

37. “Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know...”

— Muriel Rukeyser

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

— Muriel Rukeyser

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

— Muriel Rukeyser

40. “The fear of poetry is the fear.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

41. “Exchange is creation.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

42. “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.”

— Muriel Rukeyser