Top 132 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

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

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.

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

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

Shared laughter is erotic too.

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.

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

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

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

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

Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.

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

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.

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

Whatever is not an energy source, is an energy sink.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The price of seeing is silence.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.

Every poet has a certain amount of "stuff." That's what you draw from for imagery. The more stuff you know well, not simply intellectually but sensually, emotionally, intimately, the wider the pool from which you draw.

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

The powerful don't make revolutions

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Like species, couples die out or evolve.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

The real writer is one who really writes.

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.

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.

My idea of Hell is to be young again.

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.

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

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

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

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.

The work of the world is common as mud.