Marge Piercy Quotes
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Sleeping together is a euphemism for people, but tantamount to marriage with cats.
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It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.
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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.
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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.
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We must shine with hope, stained glass windows that shape light into icons, glow like lanterns borne before a procession. Who can bear hope back into the world but us...
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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.
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I'm probably the only novelist who has ever written about political fugitives who actually knew a lot about them, had contact with them, and had a realistic notion of how they survived.
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In fiction, I exercise my nosiness. I am as curious as my cats, and indeed that has led to trouble often enough and used up several of my nine lives. I am an avid listener. I am fascinated by other people's lives, the choices they make and how that works out through time, what they have done and left undone, what they tell me and what they keep secret and silent, what they lie about and what they confess, what they are proud of and what shames them, what they hope for and what they fear. The source of my fiction is the desire to understand people and their choices through time.
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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.
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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.
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The work of the world is common as mud.
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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.
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When she kissed him, he melted like a lump of milk chocolate.
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I find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people.
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Depressions, local and larger strikes, boom times, wars, repressions, all impact a life as do epidemics such as AIDS and pollution that may take years off a person's life. We all, whether we like it or not and whether we acknowledge it or not, are impacted by the racial attitudes we carry within us, and experience in some form every time we turn on the television, the radio, go to a movie, read a magazine or a newspaper, or walk down the street.
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The art of fiction is one of constant seduction. You must persuade the reader on page 1 to start reading - on page 50, or page 150 and yes, on page 850.
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One of the best gifts you can give a poet is to present them with field guides - to rocks, to stars, to birds, to wildflowers, to trees and bushes, to butterflies, to reptiles and amphibians. Because when you look at anything long enough to be able to identify it, you see far more clearly and you make a tiny beginning at understanding the life, the place, the history of that bird or rock or mammal.
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There is no justice we don't make daily like bread and love.
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We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.
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Our wedding plans please everybody as if we were fertilizing the earth and creating social luck.
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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....
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Troubles cured you salty as a country ham, smoky to the taste, thick-skinned and tender inside.
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On this twelfth day of my diet I would rather die satiated than slim.
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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 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.