Marge Piercy Quotes
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The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.
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I am a driven writer. I feel guilty if I don't write, not self-indulgent if I do.
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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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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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I find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people.
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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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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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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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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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When she kissed him, he melted like a lump of milk chocolate.
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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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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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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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The work of the world is common as mud.
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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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We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.
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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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The people I love the best, jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows.
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Our wedding plans please everybody as if we were fertilizing the earth and creating social luck.
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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.
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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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I mourn in grey, grey as the sleeted wind the bled shades of twilight, gunmetal, battleships, industrial paint.
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On this twelfth day of my diet I would rather die satiated than slim.