Marge Piercy Quotes & Sayings

They found the library sadly lacking in texts they could use. — Marge Piercy

I think we validate our lives through our actions. — Marge Piercy

She felt pride and shame wash through her. Mala, the woman who acted. To thrust herself forward into the world. — Marge Piercy

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

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

If I die this instant will you be more content with the morning news? Will your coffee taste better? I am not your fate. I am not your government ... I am not your mother, not your father or your nightmare or your health. I am not a fence, not a wall. I am not the law or actuarial tables of your insurance broker. I am a woman with my guts loose in my hands, howling and it's not because I committed hari-kiri. I suggest either you cook me or sew me back up. I suggest you walk into my pain as into the breaking waves of an ocean of blood, and either we will climb out together and walk away. — Marge Piercy

they were in love with apocalypse, like all men, more in love with myths than with any woman. — Marge Piercy

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

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

There is no justice we don't make daily like bread and love. — Marge Piercy

Thinking about tracking ... Sometime in grade school, already your fate was settled, your social
class was established for the rest of your life. — Marge Piercy

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

From the time I arrived on the Cape, one of the things I chose explicitly was to put my writing first. Everything else in my life waxed and waned, but writing, I discovered during my restructuring, was my real core. Not any relationship. Not any love. Not any person. I had become more selfish and less accessible. I ceased to be the universal mommy of the tribe. I wanted to see people when I was done with my writing for the day, and not in the middle of my work time. — Marge Piercy

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

Every time a bomb exploded, every anti-personnel weapon that sent its hundreds of particles tearing through the sift tissues of soft bodies, every helicopter that was shot down with its crew, every plane hit with a missile: brrrring, brrrring, on the great cash register in the homeland bank. It was all profit. It would have to be replaced. It was the perfect form of fantastically expensive and forced consumption, paid for by taxes. — Marge Piercy

Never in your life have you been helpless - under somebody's heel. You never lived where your enemies held power over you, power to run your life or wipe it out. You can't understand. That's how come you stand there feeding me empty slogans!" Luciente bowed her head. "You crit me justly, Connie. Forgive me. I'll try to see your situation more clearly and make less loud noises in your ears. — Marge Piercy

If what we change does not change us, we are playing with blocks. — Marge Piercy

Obviously I find women more interesting than men to write about. — Marge Piercy

Suppose that a person writes what she must. That is only the first step of becoming a writer. The work must survive the moment of creation. It must get out to an audience. She or he must dare to show the work. She must risk ridicule, misunderstanding, scandal, condemnation, & what's often worse, none of the above: silence. No attention at all. — Marge Piercy

Economy is the bone, politics is the flesh,
watch who they beat and who they eat. — Marge Piercy

The price of seeing is silence. — Marge Piercy

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

Suspense is one of the ways you persuade a reader to become engaged and stay engaged with your work. — Marge Piercy

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

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. — Marge Piercy

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

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. — Marge Piercy

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

I am a driven writer. I feel guilty if I don't write, not self-indulgent if I do. — Marge Piercy

With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life. — Marge Piercy

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

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

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

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

Where I came from, the nights I had wandered and survived scared them, and where I would go they never imagined. — Marge Piercy

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. — Marge Piercy

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

Subject that got people aroused ... was Who Owns America? ... They had a chart going ... filling in connections between the big local contractors and the steel companies and the city and county governments and the unions ... and the downtown merchants ... They found they still did not know who owned obvious centers of power like the banks. They did not know who owned the local paper. Or the radio stations. — Marge Piercy

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. — Marge Piercy

My idea of Hell is to be young again. — Marge Piercy

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. — Marge Piercy

The powerful don't make revolutions — Marge Piercy

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

The body is simple as a turtle / and straight as a dog: / the body cannot lie. — Marge Piercy

Like species, couples die out or evolve. — Marge Piercy

Depressions, local and larger strikes, boom times, wars, repressions, all impact a life as do epidemics such as AIDS and pollution that may take years off a person's life. We all, whether we like it or not and whether we acknowledge it or not, are impacted by the racial attitudes we carry within us, and experience in some form every time we turn on the television, the radio, go to a movie, read a magazine or a newspaper, or walk down the street. — Marge Piercy

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

She would not be robbed of her ability to support herself, to do good work in the world, justly, compassionately. — Marge Piercy

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

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

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

History is a game played backwards only. — Marge Piercy

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

We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves. — Marge Piercy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Marge Piercy

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

It's the last great free-for-all robbery of everybody's earth. — Marge Piercy

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

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

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

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

Our wedding plans please everybody as if we were fertilizing the earth and creating social luck. — Marge Piercy

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

The anger of the weak never goes away, Professor, it just gets a little moldy. It molds like a beautiful blue cheese in the dark, growing stronger, and more interesting. The poor and the weak die with all their anger intact and probably those angers go on growing in the dark of the grave like the hair and the nails. — Marge Piercy

Drifting with things is a habit it takes almost dying to break. — Marge Piercy

The ruling class isn't dissatisfied: they are healthy, well-fed, live in beauty, enjoy their own importance: fun-loving cannibals. — Marge Piercy

I will choose what enters me, what becomes
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.
This is my body. If I give it to you
I want it back. My life
is a non-negotiable demand. — Marge Piercy

I require a hierarchy of priorities after protecting Shira and Malkah and the small felines. — Marge Piercy

Children always wanted their parents in situ, in stasis. The faster they changed, the more their parents should remain the same. — Marge Piercy

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

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

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

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

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

I am my mother's daughter, ... I am her only novel. — Marge Piercy

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

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

Suddenly she thought that these men believed feeling itself a disease, something to be cut out like a rotten appendix. Cold, calculating, ambitious, believing themselves rational and superior, they chased the crouching female animal through the brain with a scalpel. From an early age she had been told that what she felt was unreal and didn't matter. Now they were about to place in her something that would rule her feelings like a thermostat — Marge Piercy

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

Never doubt that you can change history. You already have. — Marge Piercy

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

Love as if you liked yourself, and it may happen. — Marge Piercy

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

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

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

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

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

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

I never thought of myself as explaining cats in general. I simply viewed the cats I have known as characters in my life, often as quirky and complex as the humans with whom I have spent time. — Marge Piercy

Whenever the balance of power was unequal, there was a driver and a driven. Power was the lethal vice, the turn-on with evil built into it, because it required a victim to manifest itself. Power implied subject and object. They needed some way to recognize (for everyone to recognize) that everybody was a subject. — Marge Piercy

Burning dinner is not incompetence but war. — Marge Piercy

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

Snow lies on my fields
though the air is so warm I want
to roll on my back and wriggle.
Sure, the dark downhill weep shows
who's winning, and the thatch of tall
grass is sticking out of the banks,
but I want to start digging and planting.
My swelling hills, my leafbrown loamy
soil interlaced with worms red as mouths,
my garden,
why don't you hurry up
and take your clothes off ? — Marge Piercy