Muriel Rukeyser Quotes

Whatever the readers feel when they're reading my books, I feel it tenfold when I'm writing it.

The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable.

It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

In my theater, I'm not trying to change the world.

If a reader comes across a story that makes them cry, you can be sure that the writer felt every single thing that makes the reader cry.

The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.

I believe that, when [meeting of writer and reader] happens and the reader goes out into the world the next day, there's some alteration that might possibly inflect the person positively.

Good drama should sandpaper the mind.

It is easier to analyze a work in its form, in its evolution, than simply to love it with all the living forces of our heart. It is easier to define its peculiarities and its details than to draw out of it its emotion, its thought.

There's an old adage in writing: 'Don't tell, but show.' Writing is not psychology. We do not talk 'about' feelings. Instead the writer feels and through her words awakens those feelings in the reader. The writer takes the reader's hand and guides him through the valley of sorrow and joy without ever having to mention those words.

A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

Poetry is the breath of beauty.

What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?

That's one of the reasons I take a lot of consolation in fiction. You have years to work on it. I think that allows you to reach for the best part of your reader instead of a lot of the internet stuff, in which you're kind of reaching for the worst or the most shallow part of your reader.

The job of the art is to really convey and support that empathetic response. I always try to find where the character is mushy, and then bring that to the forefront.

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

The novel may stimulate you to think. It may satisfy your aesthetic sense. It may arouse your moral emotions. But if it does not entertain you it is a bad novel.

That's the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?

Literature is well enough, as a time-passer, and for the improvement and general elevation and purification of mankind, but it has no practical value.

There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem - whether it's the music or some other element of it - that just seems to access another part of the brain. You know, Charles Olson talks about this transfer of energy that happens between the writer and the reader of the poem. I guess there's something essential to me about acknowledging upfront the immensity of it - the difficulty of it - and even allowing that to be the subject.

Poetry is the apotheosis of sentiment.

A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It's concentrated and it nourishes you when you need it.

Yeah, I'd say there's probably about a couple of hundred people I admire - but that has nothing to do with what a person does themselves. That's why I never mention these things. You can read a detective novel you really like, but it had no bearing on what you do yourself, you just think, "God, how this guy wove this together!" Or you get into the energy of it. Or you see a poem which makes a great statement about sentiment, but it's not sentimental.

You could omit anything if you knew that the omitted part would strengthen the short story and make people feel something more than they understood