Top 100 Marge Piercy Quotes
#1. 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
#2. The people I love the best, jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows.
Marge Piercy
#4. Too much self-regard has never struck me as dignified: trying to twist over my shoulder to view my own behind.
Marge Piercy
#5. Suspense is one of the ways you persuade a reader to become engaged and stay engaged with your work.
Marge Piercy
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. I am a driven writer. I feel guilty if I don't write, not self-indulgent if I do.
Marge Piercy
#9. I think we validate our lives through our actions.
Marge Piercy
#10. What a richly colored strong warm coat is woven when love is the warp and work is the woof.
Marge Piercy
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. The will to be totally rational is the will to be made out of glass and steel: and to use others as if they were glass and steel.
Marge Piercy
#14. My strength and my weakness are twins in the same womb.
Marge Piercy
#15. I like communicating with cats. I know them and their body language - as my own cats know mine very well. Cats are adept at reading subtle signals.
Marge Piercy
#16. 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
#17. On this twelfth day of my diet I would rather die satiated than slim.
Marge Piercy
#18. Grandmother Hannah comes to me at Pesach and when I am lighting the sabbath candles. The sweet wine in the cup has her breath ... a little winter no spring can melt.
Marge Piercy
#19. It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.
Marge Piercy
#20. When she kissed him, he melted like a lump of milk chocolate.
Marge Piercy
#21. A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done
Marge Piercy
#22. 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
#23. If what we change does not change us, we are playing with blocks.
Marge Piercy
#24. 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
#25. Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream.
Marge Piercy
#26. There is no justice we don't make daily like bread and love.
Marge Piercy
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Where I came from, the nights I had wandered and survived scared them, and where I would go they never imagined.
Marge Piercy
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen.
Marge Piercy
#33. It's really important to visit a site you are writing about. Even if you know it well, even if you have lived there, it's important to take a fresh look in terms of your characters and your story.
Marge Piercy
#34. Pain is a forcing sieve that turns me to gruel.
Marge Piercy
#35. Art is a game only if you playat it, a mirror that reflects from the inside out.
Marge Piercy
#36. I want to do something very important. Like fly into the past and make it come out right.
Marge Piercy
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. It's the last great free-for-all robbery of everybody's earth.
Marge Piercy
#40. When midlist writers are treated like dirt, I would desist were I less stubborn and less committed.
Marge Piercy
#41. Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.
Marge Piercy
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. The body is simple as a turtle / and straight as a dog: / the body cannot lie.
Marge Piercy
#45. In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry,
a yam of a woman of butter and brass,
Marge Piercy
#46. Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, love with the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the windroaring and whimpering in the rooms.
Marge Piercy
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. She felt pride and shame wash through her. Mala, the woman who acted. To thrust herself forward into the world.
Marge Piercy
#50. 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
#51. Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.
Marge Piercy
#52. I don't think writers change the past any more than other people do, except in so far as we may mine our lives and change things for fictional use.
Marge Piercy
#53. Hate them more than you hate yourself, and you'll stay free!
Marge Piercy
#54. 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
#55. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Los Angeles: city that was nothing but a slot machine dispensing plastic toys.
Marge Piercy
#60. With living creatures / one must begin very early / to dwarf their growth : / the bound feet, / the crippled brain, / the hair curlers, / the hands you / love to touch.
Marge Piercy
#61. 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
#62. 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.
Marge Piercy
#63. Troubles cured you salty as a country ham, smoky to the taste, thick-skinned and tender inside.
Marge Piercy
#64. We are not different nor alike
But each strange in his leather body
sealed in skin and reaching out clumsy hands
and loving is an act
that cannot outlive
the open hand
the open eye
the door in the chest standing open.
Marge Piercy
#65. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.
Marge Piercy
#66. I am my mother's daughter, ... I am her only novel.
Marge Piercy
#67. 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
#68. 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
#70. Economy is the bone, politics is the flesh,
watch who they beat and who they eat.
Marge Piercy
#71. All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations.
Marge Piercy
#72. 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
#73. The best gift you can give is a hug: one size fits all and no one ever minds if you return it.
Marge Piercy
#74. Sleeping together is a euphemism for people, but tantamount to marriage with cats.
Marge Piercy
#75. 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
#76. When will women not be compelled
to view their bodies as science projects,
gardens to be weeded,
dogs to be trained?
When will a woman cease
to be made of pain?
Marge Piercy
#77. I think having a great range of experiences in my life had helped me as a writer, particularly a writer of fiction. I have known a great many different sorts of people in different situations, and I have a notion how very well of badly people can behave in times of stress or danger or violence.
Marge Piercy
#78. 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
#79. If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening.
Marge Piercy
#80. They found the library sadly lacking in texts they could use.
Marge Piercy
#81. Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground
Marge Piercy
#82. Children always wanted their parents in situ, in stasis. The faster they changed, the more their parents should remain the same.
Marge Piercy
#83. 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.
Marge Piercy
#84. Love as if you liked yourself, and it may happen.
Marge Piercy
#85. 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
#86. Drifting with things is a habit it takes almost dying to break.
Marge Piercy
#87. they were in love with apocalypse, like all men, more in love with myths than with any woman.
Marge Piercy
#88. 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
#89. Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding, the third
Marge Piercy
#90. 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
#91. With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.
Marge Piercy
#92. 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
#93. People were not getting back what they wanted for their sold labor. Taxes grew and services shrank. Prices rose and quality decayed. Everywhere people felt used and betrayed and coerced and cheated.
Marge Piercy
#94. The ruling class isn't dissatisfied: they are healthy, well-fed, live in beauty, enjoy their own importance: fun-loving cannibals.
Marge Piercy
#97. I require a hierarchy of priorities after protecting Shira and Malkah and the small felines.
Marge Piercy
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. This life is a war we are not yet
winning for our daughters' children.
Don't do your enemies' work for them.
Finish your own.
Marge Piercy
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