To be a Jew in the twentieth century Is to be offered a gif… - Muriel Rukeyser

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To be a Jew in the twentieth century Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse, Wishing to be invisible, you choose Death of the spirit, the stone insanity. Accepting, take full life. Full agonies: Your evening deep in labyrinthine blood Of those who resist, fail, and resist: and God Reduced to a hostage among hostages. The gift is torment.

Muriel Rukeyser

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About Muriel Rukeyser

Muriel Rukeyser (15 December 1913 – 12 February 1980) was an American poet and political activist, most famous for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism.

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All quotes from Muriel Rukeyser Similar Quotes by other Originators

Originators like Muriel Rukeyser:

Joy Harjo William Carlos Williams T. S. Eliot Denise Levertov Czesław Miłosz

Additional quotes by Muriel Rukeyser

All power is saved, having no end. Rises
in the green season, in the sudden season
the white the budded
and the lost.

I speak, then, of a poetry which tends where form tends, where meanings tend. This will be a poetry which is concerned with the crises of our spirit, with the music and the images of these meanings. It will also be a poetry of meeting-places, where the false barriers go down. For they are false. (Chapter One, p 20)

Buried, five at a time,
pine boxes, Rinehart & Dennis paid him $55
a head for burying these men in plain pine boxes.
His mother is suing him: misuse of land.

To be a Jew in the twentieth century Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse, Wishing to be invisible, you choose Death of the spirit, the stone insan… - Muriel Rukeyser

About Muriel Rukeyser

Additional quotes by Muriel Rukeyser