Marge Piercy Quotes

81 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Marge Piercy
Troubles cured you salty as a country ham,
smoky to the taste, thick skinned and tender inside.

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

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 moment shimmered like a glass of full-bodied wine.

Marge Piercy
Children always wanted their parents in situ, in stasis. The faster they changed, the more their parents should remain the same.

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
We are rich earthy cooks
both of us and the flesh we are working
off was put on with grave pleasure.

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

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

Marge Piercy
I said, I like my life. If I
have to give it back, if they
take it from me, let me only
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
Whatever is not an energy source, is an energy sink.

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

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

Marge Piercy
I write to change consciousness, to reach those people who don't agree already. Cultural work is one of the most effective ways of reaching people. If you don't support alternate ways of imagining things, people aren't going to be able to imagine a better world.

Marge Piercy
No, It's not fair. But I was thinking more along the lines of the Pentagon and Washington itself. Sometimes I suspect that those who are running things might grow addicted to power. Secrecy's essential in wartime, but once in place, will it ever be removed?

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
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
Age
has gutted me to rubbing bones
knotted up in a leather sack.

Marge Piercy