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The Life of Poetry QUOTES

The Life of Poetry QUOTES

1 " Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness "

― Muriel Rukeyser , The Life of Poetry

2 " We are against war and the sources of war.
We are for poetry and the sources of poetry. "

― Muriel Rukeyser , The Life of Poetry

3 " We hear the saints saying: Our brother the world. We hear the revolutionaries: Dare we win? "

― Muriel Rukeyser , The Life of Poetry

4 " I think there is choice possible at any moment to us, 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 , The Life of Poetry

5 " American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict....We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope; at another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the idea of perpetual warfare "

― Muriel Rukeyser , The Life of Poetry

6 " In this moment when we face horizons and conflicts wider than ever before, we want our resources, the ways of strength. We look again to the human wish, its faiths, the means by which the imagination leads us to surpass ourselves.
If there is a feeling that something has been lost, it may be because much has not yet been used, much is still to be found and begun.
Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has — the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge — infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry. "

― Muriel Rukeyser , The Life of Poetry