“How can I look back and not speak of the stupid learning about birth? Of the stupid learning that people make love, and how it seemed the reason for all things, the intimacy of my wondering, the illumination that — to an adolescent — was the cause for life around me, the reason why the unhappy people I knew did not kill themselves?”

— Muriel Rukeyser

Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 222

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Muriel Rukeyser 42

poet and political activist 1913–1980

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