Marge Piercy Quotes

81 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Marge Piercy
Regret is a damp wind
off the used car lot
where most of our peers came to rest.

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

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

Marge Piercy
Purple as tulips in May, mauve into lush velvet, purple as the stain blackberries leave on the lips, on the hands, the purple of ripe grapes sunlit and warm as flesh....

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
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
With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.

Marge Piercy
She must learn again to speak
starting with I
starting with we
starting as the infant does
with her own true hunger
and pleasure
and rage.

Marge Piercy
I walk under the sickle moon
sharpened and new and whistling.

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
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
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.

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

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

Marge Piercy
You called me bad and I posed like a gutter
queen in a dress sewn of knives.
All I feared was being stuck in a box
with a lid. A good woman appeared to me
indistinguishable from a dead one
except that she worked all the time.

Marge Piercy
All women are misfits, I think; we do not fit into this world without amputations.

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

Marge Piercy
Reflecting the values of the larger capitalistic society, there is no prestige whatsoever attached to actually working. Workers are invisible.

Marge Piercy
Bless the gift of memory
that breaks unbidden, released
from a flower or a cup of tea
so the dead move like rain through the room.

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