Marge Piercy Quotes

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

“I find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people”

— Marge Piercy

“It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.”

— 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

“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 them more than you hate yourself, and you'll stay free!”

— 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

“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

“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

“Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground”

— 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

“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

“I require a hierarchy of priorities after protecting Shira and Malkah and the small felines.”

— Marge Piercy

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

— 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

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

— Marge Piercy

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

— 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

“Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen.”

— Marge Piercy

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

— 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

“My idea of Hell is to be young again.”

— 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

“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

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

— 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

“Listening is terribly important if you want to understand anything about people. You listen to what they say and how they say it, what they share and what they are reticent about, what they tell truthfully and what they lie about, what they hope for and what they fear, what they are proud of, what they are ashamed of. If you don't pay attention to other people, how can you understand their choices through time and how their stories come out?”

— 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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

— Marge Piercy

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

— Marge Piercy

“I'm probably the only novelist who has ever written about political fugitives who actually knew a lot about them, had contact with them, and had a realistic notion of how they survived.”

— 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 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 price of seeing is silence.”

— 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

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

— Marge Piercy

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

— 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

“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

“Pain is a forcing sieve that turns me to gruel.”

— 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

“History is a game played backwards only.”

— 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

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

— Marge Piercy