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

“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, The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme

“We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

“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

“To Have Without Holding:

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch, to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can't do it, you say it's killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor's buttons blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.”
― Marge Piercy

“Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding, the third”
― Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers

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

“The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

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.

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 stand in the line and haul in their places,
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.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.”
― Marge Piercy, To Be of Use: Poems

“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 Moon Is Always Female: Poems

“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

“It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.”
― 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, Woman on the Edge of Time

“Economy is the bone, politics is the flesh,
watch who they beat and who they eat.”
― Marge Piercy

“The powerful don’t make revolutions”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

“Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream.”
― Marge Piercy, He, She and It

“Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment.”
― Marge Piercy, Sleeping with Cats

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

“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, Braided Lives

“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, Gone to Soldiers

“There is no justice we don't make daily like bread and love.”
― 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, Dance the Eagle to Sleep

“I said, I like my life. If I
have to give it back, if they
take it from me, let me
not feel I wasted any, let me
not feel I forgot to love anyone
I meant to love, that I forgot
to give what I held in my hands,
that I forgot to do some little
piece of the work that wanted
to come through.”
― 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

“Snow lies on my fields
though the air is so warm I want
to roll on my back and wriggle.
Sure, the dark downhill weep shows
who’s winning, and the thatch of tall
grass is sticking out of the banks,
but I want to start digging and planting.
My swelling hills, my leafbrown loamy
soil interlaced with worms red as mouths,
my garden,
why don’t you hurry up
and take your clothes off ?”
― Marge Piercy, The Moon Is Always Female: Poems

“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, Gone to Soldiers

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

“Hate them more than you hate yourself, and you’ll stay free!”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of 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.”
― Marge Piercy

“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 blackbirds
storming into your face.
My lightest touch leaves blue prints,
bruises on your mind.
Desire sandpapers your skin
so thin I read the veins and arteries
maps of routes I will travel
till I lodge in your spine.
The night is our fur.
We curl inside it licking.”
― Marge Piercy