Muriel Rukeyser Quotes

I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.

I am a woman and my business is to hold things together. My business is to tear them apart.

Contradiction is the lever of transcendence.

Love and charity share the same root word (caritas). How is that possible, when everything in our recent history suggest they cannot coexist, that they are antiethical, that if you put the two of them together in a sack they would bite and scratch and scream, until one of them is torn apart?

It was a brutal picture, a tug-of-war between two equal but opposing impulses. It had the ring of truth, however.

Paradox likes contradictions with exits.

In the contradiction lies the hope.

The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn't want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not stop running until I reached Greenland.

In the long run, truth is aided by nothing so much as by opposition.

Nature pulls one way and human nature another.

Contradictions make people feel off. They'll say, "Hey, you just said this and now this person is doing that, how is that possible?"

I'm not interested in a good man's life. I'm interested in contradiction.

Poetry dovetails contradictions.

Love is a drama of contradictions.

In the vocabulary of certain radical theorists contradictions are given the status of some deadly disease to which their opponents alone can succumb. But contradictions are the very stuff of life. If there had been a little dash of contradiction among the Gadarene swine some of them might have been saved from drowning.

Real life consists of the tensions produced by the incompatibility of opposites, each of which is needed

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.

For the span of my memory, this has been a city of opposing wills.

Why do progress and beauty have to be so opposed?

We are all a mess of contradictions; some of our traits work for us, some against us.

There is a thin line between attraction and repulsion

Smack in the centre of contradiction is the place to be.

Trouble comes not because we have taken any wrong step but because we are in a complex and contradictory world.

You can't take contradiction away. Part of the fun of it is that the contradiction never really quite goes away.