Authors, Poets & Novelists Posters & Prints, “Ru...-”
for literature, language arts and social studies classrooms and home schoolers.

Muriel Rukeyser
b. 12-15-1913; NYC, NY
d. 2-12-1980; NY (stroke/diabetes)

Muriel Rukeyser, whose poetry reflected her interest in “equality, feminism, social justice and Judaism”, is also remembered for her political activism that began with the Scottsboro Case and the Hawk's Nest Incident. She also opposed the Vietnam War.

Muriel Rukeyser quotes ~
• “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.”
• “As we live our truths, we will communicate across all barriers, speaking for the sources of peace. Peace that is not lack of war, but fierce and positive.”
• “Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness.”
• “The world is not made up of atoms; it's made up of stories.”
• “The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.”
• “If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.”

• How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?: The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser

Rumi
b. 9-30-1207; ancient city of Balkh, present day Afghanistan
d. 1 2-17-1273; Konya, present day Turkey

Islamic poet, theologian and mystic Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi, known today as Rumi, has been translated into many languages. Rumi can described as a evolutionary thinker with God as the “ground and goal of all existence”.

Rumi's shrine in Konya is a place of pilgrimage and the founding of the Order of Whirling Dervishes and their Sufi dance.

Rumi quotes ~
• “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
• “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”
• “Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.”
• “The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.”
• “Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.”
• “Explanation by the tongue makes most things clear, but love unexplained is clearer.”
• “Something opens our wings. Something makes boredom and hurt disappear. Someone fills the cup in front of us: We taste only sacredness.”

Damon Runyon
b. 10-4-1880; Manhattan, KS
grew up in Pueblo, CO
d. 12-10-1946 (throat cancer)

Damon Runyon is best remembered for his humorous short stories set in New York City during Prohibition era. Several of Runyon's works inspired stage works - the musical Guys and Dolls and Little Miss Marker (1934) starring Shirley Temple (remade as Sorrowful Jones in 1949, with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball.)

When Runyon died he was cremated and his ashes spread over Broadway by aviator Eddie Rickenbacker.

Damon Runyon quotes ~
• “Trust, but verify.”
• “Always try to rub up against money, for if you rub up against money long enough, some of it may rub off on you.”
• “You can become a winner only if you are willing to walk over the edge.”
• “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's how the smart money bets.”

• Damon Runyon Favorites

Salman Rushdie
b. 6-19-1947; Bombay (Mumbai), India

Novelist Sir Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children follows the life of a child endowed with special powers, born at the stroke of midnight as India gained its independence and “follows the connection to other children born at the dawn of a new and tumultuous age in the history of the Indian sub-continent”.

However, it was Rushdie fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988) that drew a fatwa from the then Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, on February 24, 1989, and threw him into the general populations attention.

Salman Rushdie quotes ~
• “Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.”
• “A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.”
• “Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.”
• “It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.”
• “A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.”
• “Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.”
• “Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.”

John Ruskin
b. 2-8-1819; London, England
d. 1-20-1900; Brantwood, Coniston, England

John Ruskin is best known as an art, architecture, and social critic. His theories about social justice influenced the development of the British Labour party and of Christian socialism. Ruskin gave away most of his inheritance, founding a charity and funding housing reform.

John Ruskin quotes ~
• “A book worth reading is worth buying.”
• “Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become.”
• “An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.”
• “Civilization is the making of civil persons.”
• “Education is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them.”
• “All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.”
• “The exaltation, the, sin, and the punishment of Tyre have been recorded for us, ...” ~ The Stones of Venice

• Mountainous Landscape by John Ruskin
• The Seven Lamps of Architecture, John Ruskin
• Praeterita (authbiography), John Ruskin

Bertrand Russell
b. 5-18-1872; Trellech, Monmouthshire, Wales
d. 2-7-1970; Wales

Social reformer and pacifist Bertrand Arthur William Russell was a philosopher, logician, mathematician, and historian. He was awarded the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature “in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought”.

Bertrand Russell quotes ~
• “Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and the unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither . . . over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.”
• “A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.”
• “Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.”
• “If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.”
• “Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.”
• “There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”

• The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

Viktor Rydberg
b. 12-18-1828; Jönköping, Sweden
d. 9-21-1895; Djursholm (diabetes and arteriosclerosis)

Kiktor Rydberg was described as “Sweden's last Romantic” and considered one of the country's finest novelists. Rydberg's fiction work rests in history and mythology.