Marge Piercy famous quotes

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

#Life #Love Is #Empathy

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

#Inspiring #Dancing #Doorways

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

#Life #May #Like You

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

#Strength #Inspiring #Strong Women

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.
-- Marge Piercy

#Giving #Choices #Mind

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

#Mother #Children #Father

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

#Sex #Giving #Lovers

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

#Weakness #Twins #Womb

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

#Listening #Want #Should

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

#Strong Women #Wind #Blue

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

#Business #Real #Work

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

#Grief #Twilight #Wind

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

#History #Doubt

Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.
-- Marge Piercy

#War #Burning #Dinner

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

#Spring #Sleep #Waiting

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

#Ideas #Hell #Young

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

#Block #Doe

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

#Lying #Cat #Exercise

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

#Revenge #War #Wings

Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.
-- Marge Piercy

#Cures #Being Loved

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

#Trying #Experiments

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

#Travel #Real #War

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

#Daughter #Perseverance #Children

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

#Night #Anxiety #Scared

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

#Dream #Real #Mirrors

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

#Real #Writing #Fire

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

#Yams #Curry #Brass

i find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people
-- Marge Piercy

#Depressing #People #Tree

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

#Justice #And Love #Bread

Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream.
-- Marge Piercy

#Dream #Eye #Artist

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

#Hate #Evil #Mind

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

#Imagine #Utopia

Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment.
-- Marge Piercy

#Writing #Moments #Disappear

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

#Mother #Memories #Husband

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

#Sleep #Cat #People

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

#Lying #Eye #Romantic Love

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

#Best Love #Chocolate #Milk

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
-- Marge Piercy

#Time #Connections #Made

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

#Beautiful #Dark #Hair

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

#Giving #Hug #Mind

History is a game played backwards only.
-- Marge Piercy

#Games #History #Backwards

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

#Thinking #Ideas #United States

Whatever is not an energy source, is an energy sink.
-- Marge Piercy

#Energy #Source

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

#Country #Adversity #Ham

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

#Dog #Lying #Simple

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

#Hands #Giving #Said

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

#Clouds #Air #Blood

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

#Real #Thinking #Thoughtful

Now that I am in my forties, she [my mother] tells me I'm beautiful; now that I am in my forties, she sends me presents and we have the long, personal and even remarkably honest phone calls I always wanted so intensely I forbade myself to imagine them. How strange. Perhaps Shaw was correct and if we lived to be several hundred years old, we would finally work it all out. I am deeply grateful. With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.
-- Marge Piercy

#Beautiful #Mother #Grateful

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

#Couple #Evolve #Species

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

#Ideas #Done #Want

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

#Sex #Moon #Dresses

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

#Creating #Luck #Earth

If sex is a war, I am a conscientious objector: I will not play.
-- Marge Piercy

#Sex #War #Play

Too much self-regard has never struck me as dignified: trying to twist over my shoulder to view my own behind.
-- Marge Piercy

#Self #Views #Trying

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

#Fun #Class #Healthy

Pain is a forcing sieve that turns me to gruel.
-- Marge Piercy

#Pain #Turn Me #Turns

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

#Mother #Remember #Quarrels

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

#Loyalty #Party #Political

Art is a game only if you playat it, a mirror that reflects from the inside out.
-- Marge Piercy

#Art #Mirrors #Games

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

#Hair #Long #Fans

The work of the world is common as mud.
-- Marge Piercy

#World #Mud #Common

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

#Love #Letting Go #Hurt

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

#Strength #Dark #Fire

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

#Long #Growth #Digging

Every baby born unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come due in twenty years with interest, an anger that must find a target, a pain that will beget pain. A decade downstream a child screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched, a firing squad is summoned, a button is pushed and the world burns.
-- Marge Piercy

#Baby #Children #Pain

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

#Doorways #Sacred

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

#Dust #Hands #Done

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

#Baby #Kids #Thinking

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

#Mother #Son #Beloved

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

#Glasses #Steel #Use

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

#Dream #Eye #Moon

The powerful don't make revolutions
-- Marge Piercy

#Powerful #Revolution

The price of seeing is silence.
-- Marge Piercy

#Silence

On this twelfth day of my diet I would rather die satiated than slim.
-- Marge Piercy

#Slim

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

#Women #People #Firsts

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

#Happiness #Strong #Work

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.
-- Marge Piercy

#Ideas #Perfection #Grace

Shared laughter is erotic too.
-- Marge Piercy

#Laughter

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

#Writing #Silence #Risk

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

#Men #World #Amputation

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

#Daughter #Mother #Novel

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

#Hands #Purple #Velvet

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

#Sweet #Spring #Wine

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

#Eye #Angel #Brain

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

#Strong Women #Eye #Justice