"I can understand that memory must be selective, else it would choke on the glut of experience. What I cannot understand is why it selects what it does."

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Source: Virgilia Peterson (1961). “A Matter of Life and Death”, Bantam Books

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Virgilia Peterson

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Virgilia Peterson was a notable writer and activist known for her poignant exploration of race, identity, and resilience in her literary works.

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"A lady, that is an enlightened, cultivated, liberal lady - the only kind to be in a time of increasing classlessness - could espouse any cause: wayward girls, social diseases, unmarried mothers, and/or birth control with impunity. But never by so much as the shadow of a look should she acknowledge her own experience with the Facts of Life."

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"Were marriage no more than a convenient screen for sexuality, some less cumbersome and costly protection must have been found by this time to replace it. One concludes therefore that people do not marry to cohabit; they cohabit to marry. They do not seek freedom to rut so much as they seek the rut of wedlock."

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"However often marriage is dissolved, it remains indissoluble. Real divorce, the divorce of the heart and nerve and fiber, does not exist, since there is no divorce from memory."

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