Marge Piercy Quotes

81 Sourced Quotes

Moments
of sinking my teeth
into now like a hungry fox:
never otherwise
am I so cruel;
never otherwise
so happy.

Marge Piercy
Memory's a freakish bank
where embarrassing treasures
still draw interest.

Marge Piercy
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.

Marge Piercy
You are built to pull a cart, to lift a heavy load and bear it, to haul up the long slope, and so am I, peasant bodies, earthy, solid shapely dark glazed clay pots that can stand on the fire.

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

Marge Piercy
The ruling class isn't dissatisfied: they are healthy, well-fed, live in beauty, enjoy their own importance: fun-loving cannibals.

Marge Piercy
Despair is the worst betrayal, the coldest seduction:
to believe at last that the enemy will prevail.

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

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

Marge Piercy
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
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
Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream.

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

Marge Piercy
Our wedding plans please everybody as if we were fertilizing the earth and creating social luck.

Marge Piercy
Remember that every son had a mother whose beloved son he was, and every woman had a mother whose beloved son she wasn't.

Marge Piercy
Life on the streets killed you slow, but sometimes people or the weather saw that it happened a lot faster.

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

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

Marge Piercy
Fear of rape is a cold wind blowing
all of the time on a woman's hunched back.

Marge Piercy
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
The incidence of violent brand-loyalty to one's own current dogma has risen.

Marge Piercy