Marge Piercy Quotations

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

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

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

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.

Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

It you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening

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.

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.

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.

I wrote to make sense out of all the contradictions I experienced and to deal with the pain and loss I was undergoing.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Praise our choices, sister, for each doorway open to us was taken by squads of fighting women who paid years of trouble and struggle, who paid their wombs, their sleep, their lives that we might walk through these gates upright. Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out. Freedom is our real abundance.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out.

When midlist writers are treated like dirt, I would desist were I less stubborn and less committed.

Shared laughter is erotic too.

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.

The work of the world is common as mud.

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.

The powerful don't make revolutions

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.

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

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....

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

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

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.

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

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.

Remember that every son had a mother whose beloved son he was, and every woman had a mother whose beloved son she wasn't.

Memory in Greek mythology is the mother of the muses, and it is so for me. Both personal and societal memory move me strongly, and that is one of the sources of my writing.

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

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

There are obviously a great many ways to organize some fraction of the material in a life.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I think we validate our lives through our actions.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out. 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.

I think that if you use something from you life in fiction, it metamorphosizes into something strange and different. Afterward it is hard to tell what actually was part of your life and what is part of the story of the fictional character.

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.

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

Pain is a forcing sieve that turns me to gruel.

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.

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

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

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.

Sometimes when a character in a novel is difficult for me to enter, I sue something in myself or in my own life as a doorway into that character's mind and emotions.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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!

Like species, couples die out or evolve.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

History is a game played backwards only.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.