Marge Piercy Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My idea of Hell is to be young again. ~ 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

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

Shared laughter is erotic too. ~ 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

Finally something besides infatuation had focused him. He was no longer merely flowing water. ~ 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

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

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 think we validate our lives through our actions. ~ 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 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

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

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

Economy is the bone, politics is the flesh,
watch who they beat and who they eat. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like species, couples die out or evolve. ~ 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

When I was a child, I first noticed that neither history as I was taught it nor the stories I was told seemed to lead to me. I began to fix them. ~ 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

Whoever owned this place, these cities, whoever owned those glittering glassy office buildings in midtown filled with the purr of money turning over, those refineries over the river in Jersey with their flames licking the air, they gave nothing back. They took and took and left their garbage choking the air, the river, the sea itself. Choking her. A life of garbage. Human garbage. She had had too little of what her body needed and too little of what her soul could imagine. She had been able to do little in the years of her life, and that little had been ill paid or punished. The rest was garbage. ~ Marge Piercy

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

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground ~ Marge Piercy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. ~ 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

I want to do something very important. Like fly into the past and make it come out right. ~ Marge Piercy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The societies kids naturally form are tribal. Gangs, clubs, packs. But we're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb. ~ Marge Piercy

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

We are trying to live
as if we were an experiment
conducted by the future ~ 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

And what about ageing? Do men force the fear of ageing upon us
or are we ourselves terrified because we only know one kind of power
the power of youthful beauty?
Isn't it possible that if we became comfortable with other forms of female power, men might too? In her wonderful futurist novel, He, She, and It, Marge Piercy imagines a cyborg who is taught to love the bodies of older women. A delicious proposal
because it tells that whatever we may imagine can come true. Women often hate their own bodies. Sometimes I think that the most important things about having at least one relationship with someone of your own gender
especially if you are a woman
is to confront the female self-hatred and turn it into self-love. ~ Erica Jong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walking bores me. I mean, we have to have a goal. ~ 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

Burning dinner is not incompetence but war. ~ 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

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

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