Piercy Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

Never let them know who you really are, how you live, and that you can observe and think, that was her motto. — 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

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

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

Los Angeles: city that was nothing but a slot machine dispensing plastic toys. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Marge Piercy

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

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

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

Show me a person who blames others for their problems, and I'll show you a miserable person. — Roy A. Piercy

The powerful don't make revolutions — Marge Piercy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love says, mine. Love says, I could eat you up. Love says, stay as you are, be my own private thing, don't you dare have ideas I don't share. Love has just got to gobble the other, bones and all, crunch. I don't want to do that. I sure don't want it done to me! — Marge Piercy

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

Writing implies faith in someone listening,/ different in content but not need/ from the child who cries in the night./ Making is an attack on dying, on chaos,/ on blind inertia, on the second law/ of thermodynamics, on indifference, on cold,/ on contempt, on the silence/ that does not follow the chord resolved,/ the sentence spoken, but the something/ that cannot be said. — Marge Piercy

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

Although we have shared lodgings for seven years, we are not--on intimate terms."

I spoke earnestly, for I certainly could not afford to have her misunderstand the situation. She regarded me seriously.

"You are very fond of him, however, and would wish things otherwise," she said.

I gripped the edge of my seat and did not reply. Turning to look at the street, I observed that we were just passing the door of the Cafe Royal and were approaching Regent Circus. I shifted my gaze abruptly to the swaying interior of the hansom. I felt Miss D'Arcy's eyes upon me.

"Is it so very obvious?" I said at last. — Rohase Piercy

Like species, couples die out or evolve. — 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

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

I did not always know I would be a writer. Until I had a room of my own, I did not write much at all - no more than any other child who read a lot of books. I began to write fiction and poetry when I first had a room that was truly my own with a door that shut and some measure, however fragile, of privacy. — Marge Piercy

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

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

Everything you study, everything you learn, makes you a better writer, because you have more understanding of how things work. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground — 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

I find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people — Marge Piercy

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

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

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

By late-2000 Wal-Mart's losses were running in excess of £150 million a year in Germany from its 95 stores, and the company was ranked bottom of all retailers in Germany in an annual customer satisfaction survey. — Nigel F. 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

When she kissed him, he melted like a lump of milk chocolate. — Marge Piercy

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

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

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

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

Huddled in her mink in the Kansas City airport, she had a vision of women writing about sex as openly as male writers, but quite, quite differently. Some women would treat sex much as men did,as conquest, as adventure
in a way as McCarthy had. Other women would treat female sexuality far less romantically then men who did not consider themselves romantics, like Hemingway, were wont to. The earth would not move, no, there would be more biology and less theatrics. Women had less ego involvement in sex than men did, but far more at stake economically. — Marge Piercy

Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream. — 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

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

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

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