Top 100 Marge Piercy Quotes
#1. Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding, the third
Marge Piercy
#2. The moon is always female and so am I although often in the vale of razorblades I have wished I could put on and take off my sex like a dress and why not?
Marge Piercy
#3. Sleeping together is a euphemism for people, but tantamount to marriage with cats.
Marge Piercy
#4. Good will starts out fat and sweet
as tub butter and turns slowly rancid.
It must be made again daily
if we want it fresh.
Marge Piercy
#5. All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations.
Marge Piercy
#6. Economy is the bone, politics is the flesh,
watch who they beat and who they eat.
Marge Piercy
#7. Attention is love, what we must give
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can't bless it, get ready to make it new.
Marge Piercy
#8. The politics of the exile are fever,
revenge, daydream,
theater of the aging convalescent.
You wait in the wings and rehearse.
You wait and wait.
Marge Piercy
#9. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.
Marge Piercy
#10. Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.
Marge Piercy
#11. Troubles cured you salty as a country ham, smoky to the taste, thick-skinned and tender inside.
Marge Piercy
#12. Helpless as a burning city, / how can I ignore that the extremes / of pleasure are fire storms / that leave a vacuum into which / dangerous feelings (tenderness, / affection, l o v e) may rush / like gale force winds.
Marge Piercy
#13. The need exists. I serve the need. After me the need will exist and the need will be served. Let me do well what has and will be done as well by others. Let me take on the role and then let it go.
Marge Piercy
#14. Remember that every son had a mother whose beloved son he was, and every woman had a mother whose beloved son she wasn't.
Marge Piercy
#16. I wrote to make sense out of all the contradictions I experienced and to deal with the pain and loss I was undergoing.
Marge Piercy
#17. 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.
Marge Piercy
#18. Hate them more than you hate yourself, and you'll stay free!
Marge Piercy
#19. Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out.
Marge Piercy
#20. 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.
Marge Piercy
#23. 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.
Marge Piercy
#24. With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.
Marge Piercy
#25. 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.
Marge Piercy
#26. Shall I tell you something I've been noticing? The mistrust this society has for women. All kinds of experts and officials are terrified because so many women are working. They really think that women have to be coerced into having babies and raising kids.
Marge Piercy
#27. they were in love with apocalypse, like all men, more in love with myths than with any woman.
Marge Piercy
#28. Drifting with things is a habit it takes almost dying to break.
Marge Piercy
#29. Any life is lived in a particular time and place. Every life is impacted by the family's socio-economic circumstances, and, in later life, by the person's.
Marge Piercy
#30. Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground
Marge Piercy
#31. They found the library sadly lacking in texts they could use.
Marge Piercy
#32. If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening.
Marge Piercy
#33. Nobody hates us as ourselves. In their minds we're not human ... They don't hate us because we did something or said something. They make us stand for an evil they invent and then they want to kill it in us.
Marge Piercy
#34. It's the last great free-for-all robbery of everybody's earth.
Marge Piercy
#35. Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream.
Marge Piercy
#36. If I observe my cats carefully, it is partly because I observe everyone I deal with as carefully as I can and partly because they amuse and entertain me. They are an important part of the fabric of my daily life.
Marge Piercy
#37. If what we change does not change us, we are playing with blocks.
Marge Piercy
#38. Don't be ridiculous! You waste less time than anyone I know.'
'You don't know, sweetie. For years I've had down days. Days I just can't cope. Can't get on with anything. Can't get up and out or at it or whatever.'
'Not enough to keep you from being invaluable politically.
Marge Piercy
#39. When she kissed him, he melted like a lump of milk chocolate.
Marge Piercy
#40. It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.
Marge Piercy
#41. On this twelfth day of my diet I would rather die satiated than slim.
Marge Piercy
#42. People are very afraid of any controversy. We've become very passive spectator types. And when the kids were protesting globilization - quite reasonably - they really got bashed.
Marge Piercy
#43. The mind wraps itself around a poem. It is almost sensual, particularly if you work on a computer. You can turn the poem round and about and upside down, dancing with it a kind of bolero of two snakes twisting and coiling, until the poem has found its right and proper shape.
Marge Piercy
#44. A strong woman is a woman at work, cleaning out the cesspool of the ages, and while she shovels, she talks about how she doesn't mind crying, it opens the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up develops the stomach muscles, and she goes on shoveling with tears in her nose.
Marge Piercy
#45. She had been swimming in a big pink aquarium, and she never thought that somebody would come along with a hammer and break it until she was gasping for her life and everything she had taken for granted, for permanent, was gone.
Marge Piercy
#46. What a richly colored strong warm coat is woven when love is the warp and work is the woof.
Marge Piercy
#47. I think we validate our lives through our actions.
Marge Piercy
#48. I am a driven writer. I feel guilty if I don't write, not self-indulgent if I do.
Marge Piercy
#49. I don't find that writing about parts of my life had much effect except in some cases to improve my memory. To get into parts of the past I want to recall very vividly, I use a form of directed meditation.
Marge Piercy
#50. 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.
Marge Piercy
#51. Suspense is one of the ways you persuade a reader to become engaged and stay engaged with your work.
Marge Piercy
#53. The people I love the best, jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows.
Marge Piercy
#54. The art of fiction is one of constant seduction. You must persuade the reader on page 1 to start reading - on page 50, or page 150 and yes, on page 850.
Marge Piercy
#55. She felt pride and shame wash through her. Mala, the woman who acted. To thrust herself forward into the world.
Marge Piercy
#56. No, It's not fair. But I was thinking more along the lines of the Pentagon and Washington itself. Sometimes I suspect that those who are running things might grow addicted to power. Secrecy's essential in wartime, but once in place, will it ever be removed?
Marge Piercy
#57. I have no connections here; only gusty collisions,
rootless seedlings forced into bloom, that collapse.
...
I am the Visiting Poet: a real unicorn,
a wind-up plush dodo, a wax museum of the Movement.
People want to push the buttons and see me glow.
Marge Piercy
#58. The body is simple as a turtle / and straight as a dog: / the body cannot lie.
Marge Piercy
#59. A little man in a threadbare coat spoke up for the poor as if he really knew what he was talking about. The women with the flowers threw them down for him. "That's Robert Speer," one said. "Something like that. He's our man.
Marge Piercy
#60. I wasn't afraid of being poor; I rather took it for granted. I was good at getting by with very little. I couldn't imagine sacrificing my writing to anything else.
Marge Piercy
#61. There is no justice we don't make daily like bread and love.
Marge Piercy
#62. 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 ...
Marge Piercy
#63. The sense of being Jewish never left me, but when my grandmother died, I rebelled against Judaism as I knew it then, which was Orthodox. I saw the rituals, a lot of them, as very male, for a long time.
Marge Piercy
#64. I want to do something very important. Like fly into the past and make it come out right.
Marge Piercy
#65. Art is a game only if you playat it, a mirror that reflects from the inside out.
Marge Piercy
#66. Pain is a forcing sieve that turns me to gruel.
Marge Piercy
#67. Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen.
Marge Piercy
#68. I don't apologize for being sexually adventurous. Why not? It was often fun. When it wasn't - I didn't continue what wasn't pleasant.
Marge Piercy
#69. Her life seemed to her a great engineering work scarcely begun. Lately more excavation than construction had occurred. She had lost a sense of her own invincibility. In that way she was no longer archetypically American.
Marge Piercy
#70. Where I came from, the nights I had wandered and survived scared them, and where I would go they never imagined.
Marge Piercy
#71. 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 ...
Marge Piercy
#72. Nobody can live on a bridge or plant potatoes but it is fine for comings and goings, meetings, partings and long views and a real connection to someplace else where you may in the crazy weathers of struggle how and again want to be.
Marge Piercy
#73. Only when we break the mirror and climb into our vision,
only when we are the wind together streaming and singing,
only in the dream we become with our bones for spears,
we are real at last
and wake.
Marge Piercy
#74. Was part of owning the world never to think ... Did they laugh at the fools they robbed, who were fool enough to admire them and vote them into office so they could arrange things more conveniently for their enterprises?
Marge Piercy
#75. We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.
Marge Piercy
#76. Everything you study, everything you learn, makes you a better writer, because you have more understanding of how things work.
Marge Piercy
#77. Looking at my life was very difficult. I think I learned that I haven't been as good a person as I'm inclined to think of myself as. I haven't been as good friend, haven't been as good a person, made a lot of mistakes.
Marge Piercy
#78. Whatever is not an energy source, is an energy sink.
Marge Piercy
#79. An 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.
Marge Piercy
#80. We may be losing the ability to understand animals who are not pets or horses. We have less contact with them. We don't (most of us) tend to know even cows and pigs, let alone bears or wolverines or red tailed hawks.
Marge Piercy
#81. Finally something besides infatuation had focused him. He was no longer merely flowing water.
Marge Piercy
#82. We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.
Marge Piercy
#83. Your anger was a climate I inhabited like a desert in a dry frigid weather of high thin air and ivory sun, sand dunes the wind lifted into stinging clouds that blinded and choked me where the only ice was in the blood.
Marge Piercy
#85. 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.
Marge Piercy
#86. But I think we often settle for sex when we want love. And we often want love when we need something else, like a good job or a chance to go back to school.
Marge Piercy
#87. One trouble: to be a professional anything in the United States is to think of oneself as an expert and one's ideas as semisacred, and to treat others in a certain way - professionally.
Marge Piercy
#88. Every Jewish holiday has a religious significance, a historical significance, and a relevance to the time of year in the natural calendar of the seasons and trees and growing things, as well as a personal significance. So you are always looking backward, outward, inward and forward.
Marge Piercy
#89. Never let them know who you really are, how you live, and that you can observe and think, that was her motto.
Marge Piercy
#90. We live in a media soup and are constantly being programmed or are fighting that programming. Thus any truthful account of a life, every part of a life, is about society as well as an individual.
Marge Piercy
#91. 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.
Marge Piercy
#92. I find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people
Marge Piercy
#93. I don't even remember what Mother and I quarreled about: it is a continual quarrel that began when I reached puberty.
Marge Piercy
#94. The incidence of violent brand-loyalty to one's own current dogma has risen.
Marge Piercy
#95. Our wedding plans please everybody as if we were fertilizing the earth and creating social luck.
Marge Piercy
#96. Hope sleeps in our bones like a bear waiting for spring to rise and walk.
Marge Piercy
#97. She would not be robbed of her ability to support herself, to do good work in the world, justly, compassionately.
Marge Piercy
#98. Variant selves haunt
the corridors of my brain, people
my novels, crowd in like ghosts
drawn to blood when friends
or strangers tell me secrets,
hand me their troubles,
sweaters knit of hair and wire.
Marge Piercy
#99. We admire predators - panthers, lions, tigers, even wolves. Maybe to be naturally thoughtful and hesitant to use violence is to be somehow second rate. To be in the middle of the social food chain. Especially if you're a man. This society thinks real men are violent.
Marge Piercy
#100. My grandmother was very important to me. She gave me my religious education. She gave me a sense of the female side of Judaism, of the rich store of stories and legends of the women of the schtetl.
Marge Piercy
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