Life & Wisdom Quote by Muriel Rukeyser

Rukeyser’s line is a quiet provocation dressed up as a bedtime-simple aphorism: reality doesn’t arrive in our lives as chemistry. It arrives as narrative. In the mouth of a poet who spent her career insisting that politics, science, and personal witness belong in the same frame, “stories” isn’t a flight from facts; it’s a claim about how facts become human. Atoms can be counted, but they can’t be mourned, argued over, legislated, or loved. Stories can.

The intent is corrective. Mid-century culture loved the prestige of the lab and the cold glamour of objectivity, often as a way to dodge responsibility. Rukeyser flips the hierarchy. She doesn’t deny the material world; she denies that material explanation is the final explanation. The subtext is ethical: if the universe we inhabit is made of stories, then who gets to tell them matters, and whose stories are erased becomes a form of violence. That’s the political charge hiding in the lyric sheen.

It also works because it smuggles a radical democratic idea into a cosmic statement. “Atoms” belong to experts; “stories” belong to everyone. The sentence invites a reallocation of authority from institutions that claim neutrality to communities that carry memory. Coming from a poet associated with documentary impulse and social conscience, it reads less like mysticism and more like a demand: stop pretending the world is only what can be measured. The measurable is real; the narratable is what makes it consequential.