Marge Piercy Quotes

81 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
The moment shimmered like a glass of full-bodied wine.

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
A woman and a Jew, sometimes more
of a contradiction than I can sweat out,
yet finally the intersection that is both
collision and fusion, stone and seed.

Marge Piercy
I find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people

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

Marge Piercy
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.

Marge Piercy
He... treats his emotions like mice that infest our basement or the rats in the garage, as vermin to be crushed in traps or poisoned with bait.

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
now and again want to be.

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

Marge Piercy
We have limited resources. We plan co-operatively. We can afford to waste... nothing. You might say our – you'd say religion? – ideas make us see ourselves as partners with water, air, birds, fish trees.

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

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
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
Falling out of love
is a rusty chain going quickly through a winch.
It hurts more than you will remember.

Marge Piercy