The Book of the Dead Quotes

“What three things can never be done?
Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone.
The hill of glass, the fatal brilliant plain.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead

“It is growing worse every day. At night
"I get up to catch my breath. If I remained
"flat on my back I believe I would die.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead

“But planted in our flesh these valleys stand,
everywhere we begin to know the illness,
are forced up, and our times confirm us all.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead

“This is the dark. Lights strung up all the way.
Depression; and driven deeper in,
by hunger, pistols, and despair,
they took the tunnel.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead

“The man in the white coat is the man on the hill,
the man with the clean hands is the man with the drill,
the man who answers "yes" lies still.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead

“These are roads to take when you think of your country”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead

“What do you want – a cliff over a city?
A foreland, sloped to sea and overgrown with roses?
These people live here.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead

“These are our strength, who strike against history.
These whose corrupt cells owe their new styles of weakness to our diseases;

these carrying light for safety on their foreheads
descended deeper for richer faults of ore,
drilling their death.

These touching radium and the luminous poison,
carried their death on their lips and with their warning
glow in their graves.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead

“Sloping as gracefully as thighs, the foothills
narrow to this, clouds over every town
finally indicate the stored destruction.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead

“These men breathe hard
but the committee has a voice of steel.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead

“It breaks the hills, cracking the riches wide,
runs through electric wires;
it comes, warning the night,
running among these rigid hills,
a single force to waken our eyes.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead

“And still go down.
Now ladder-mouth; and the precipitous fear,
uncertain rungs down into after-night.
"This is the place. Away from this my life
I am indeed Adam unparadiz'd.
Some fools call this the Black Hole of Calcutta,
I don't know how they ever get to Congress.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead

“The quick sun brings, exciting mountains warm,
gay on the landscapers and green designs,
miracle, yielding the sex up under all the skin,
until the entire body watches the scene with love,
sees perfect cliffs ranging until the river
cuts sheer, mapped far below in delicate track,
surprise of grace, the water running in the sun,
magnificent flower on the mouth, surprise
as lovers who look too long on the desired face
startled to find the remote flesh so warm.
A day of heat shed on the gorge, a brilliant
day when love sees the sun behind its man
and the disguised marvel under familiar skin.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead

“Between us, love
the buses at the door
the long glass street two years, my death to yours
my death upon your lips
my face becoming glass
strong challenged time making me win immortal
the love a mirror of our valley
our street our river a deadly glass to hold.
Now they are feeding me in to a steel mill furnace
O love the stream of glass a stream of living fire.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead

“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.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead

“The scene of hope's ahead; look, April,
and next month with a softer wind,
maybe they'll rest upon their land,
and then maybe the happy song, and love,
a tall boy who was never in a tunnel.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead

“The water they would bring had dust in it, our drinking water,
the camps and their groves were colored with the dust,
we cleaned our clothes in the groves, but we always had the dust.
Looked like somebody sprinkled flour all over the parks and groves,
it stayed and the rain couldn't wash it away and it twinkled
that white dust really looked pretty down around our ankles.

As dark as I am, when I came out at morning after the tunnel at night,
with a white man, nobody could have told which man was white.
The dust had covered us both, and the dust was white.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead

“Did you ever bury thirty-five men in a place in back of your house,
thirty-five tunnel workers the doctors didn't attend,
died in the tunnel camps, under rocks, everywhere, world without end.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead

“The boy worked there about eighteen months,
came home one evening with a shortness of breath.
He said, "Mother, I cannot get my breath."
Shirley was sick about three months.
I would carry him from his bed to the table,
from his bed to the porch. in my arms.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead

“I wake up choking, and my wife
"rolls me over on my left side;
"then I'm asleep in the dream I always see:
"the tunnel choked
"the dark wall coughing dust.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead

“All power is saved, having no end.     Rises
in the green season, in the sudden season
the white the budded
                                             and the lost.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead