Marge Piercy Quotes

We must shine with hope, stained glass windows that shape light into icons, glow like lanterns borne before a procession. Who can bear hope back into the world but us.

Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.

We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.

I will choose what enters me, what becomes flesh of my flesh. Without choice, no politics, no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield, not your uranium mine, not your calf for fattening, not your cow for milking. You may not use me as your factory. Priests and legislators do not hold shares in my womb or my mind. If I give it to you, I want it back. My life is a non-negotiable demand.

A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done.

It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.

Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen: reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in. This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always, for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

Long hair is considered bohemian, which may be why I grew it, but I keep it long because I love the way it feels, part cloak, part fan, part mane, part security blanket.

All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations.

A strong woman is a woman who craves love like oxygen or she turns blue choking. A strong woman is a woman who loves strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong in words, in action, in connection, in feeling; she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

Hope sleeps in our bones like a bear waiting for spring to rise and walk.

Every poet has a certain amount of "stuff." That's what you draw from for imagery. The more stuff you know well, not simply intellectually but sensually, emotionally, intimately, the wider the pool from which you draw.

A new idea is rarely born like Venus attended by graces. More commonly it's modeled of baling wire and acne. More commonly it wheezes and tips over.

If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening.

Remember that every son had a mother whose beloved son he was, and every woman had a mother whose beloved son she wasn't.

I don't even remember what Mother and I quarreled about: it is a continual quarrel that began when I reached puberty.

Listening is terribly important if you want to understand anything about people. You listen to what they say and how they say it, what they share and what they are reticent about, what they tell truthfully and what they lie about, what they hope for and what they fear, what they are proud of, what they are ashamed of. If you don't pay attention to other people, how can you understand their choices through time and how their stories come out?

Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.

My strength and my weakness are twins in the same womb.

We lie in each other's arms eyes shut and fingers open and all the colors of the world pass through our bodies like strings of fire.

The best gift you can give is a hug: one size fits all and no one ever minds if you return it.

Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment. All that remains of my mother is what I remember and what I have written for and about her. Eventually that is all that will remain of [my husband] and me. Writing sometimes feels frivolous and sometimes sacred, but memory is one of my strongest muses. I serve her with my words. So long as people read, those we love survive however evanescently. As do we writers, saying with our life's work, Remember. Remember us. Remember me.

I stayed under the moon too long.I am silvered with lust.Dreams flick like minnows through my eyes.My voice is trees tossing in the wind.I loose myself like a flock of blackbirdsstorming into your face.My lightest touch leaves blue prints,bruises on your mind.Desire sandpapers your skinso thin I read the veins and arteriesmaps of routes I will traveltill I lodge in your spine.The night is our fur.We curl inside it licking.

We're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb.

Purple as tulips in May, mauve into lush velvet, purple as the stain blackberries leave on the lips, on the hands, the purple of ripe grapes sunlit and warm as flesh.

What a richly colored strong warm coat is woven when love is the warp and work is the woof.

My idea of Hell is to be young again.

I said, I like my life. If Ihave to give it back, if theytake it from me, let me onlynot feel I wasted any, let menot feel I forgot to love anyoneI meant to love, that I forgotto give what I held in my hands,that I forgot to do some littlepiece of the work that wantedto come through.

You are built to pull a cart, to lift a heavy load and bear it, to haul up the long slope, and so am I, peasant bodies, earthy, solid shapely dark glazed clay pots that can stand on the fire.

One of the best gifts you can give a poet is to present them with field guides - to rocks, to stars, to birds, to wildflowers, to trees and bushes, to butterflies, to reptiles and amphibians. Because when you look at anything long enough to be able to identify it, you see far more clearly and you make a tiny beginning at understanding the life, the place, the history of that bird or rock or mammal.

The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.

The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

I mourn in grey, grey as the sleeted wind the bled shades of twilight, gunmetal, battleships, industrial paint.

Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.

When I work I am pure as an angel tiger and clear is my eye and hot my brain and silent all the whining grunting piglets of the appetites.

I was a working class Jewish girl. In my girlhood, anti-Semitism was a daily fact of life in Detroit. I did not come from people who had many options in their lives or many choices open to them. I was a girl in a family in which women were, as in society at large, very much second-class citizens. I did not see why I should accept these forced limitations without a fight. Being free to make my own choices thus became very important to me at an early age.

In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry, a yam of a woman of butter and brass.

Sleeping together is a euphemism for people, but tantamount to marriage with cats.

The incidence of violent brand-loyalty to one's own current dogma has risen.

Troubles cured you salty as a country ham, smoky to the taste, thick-skinned and tender inside.

It hurts to love wide open stretching the muscles... It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch; to love and let go again and again.

The price of seeing is silence.

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

In fiction, I exercise my nosiness. I am as curious as my cats, and indeed that has led to trouble often enough and used up several of my nine lives. I am an avid listener. I am fascinated by other people's lives, the choices they make and how that works out through time, what they have done and left undone, what they tell me and what they keep secret and silent, what they lie about and what they confess, what they are proud of and what shames them, what they hope for and what they fear. The source of my fiction is the desire to understand people and their choices through time.

Like species, couples die out or evolve.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.

If what we change does not change us we are playing with blocks.

We are trying to live as if we were an experiment conducted by the future

The people I love the best, jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows.