Marge Piercy Quotes
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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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A new idea is rarely born like Venus attended by graces. More commonly it's modeled of baling wire and acne. More commonly it wheezes and tips over.
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Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.
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The work of the world is common as mud.
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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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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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Troubles cured you salty as a country ham, smoky to the taste, thick-skinned and tender inside.
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Every poet has a certain amount of "stuff." That's what you draw from for imagery. The more stuff you know well, not simply intellectually but sensually, emotionally, intimately, the wider the pool from which you draw.
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Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment.
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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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The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.
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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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There are obviously a great many ways to organize some fraction of the material in a life.
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We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.
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I think that if you use something from you life in fiction, it metamorphosizes into something strange and different. Afterward it is hard to tell what actually was part of your life and what is part of the story of the fictional character.
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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 don't find that writing about parts of my life had much effect except in some cases to improve my memory. To get into parts of the past I want to recall very vividly, I use a form of directed meditation.
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Any life is lived in a particular time and place. Every life is impacted by the family's socio-economic circumstances, and, in later life, by the person's.
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History is a game played backwards only.
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Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment. All that remains of my mother is what I remember and what I have written for and about her. Eventually that is all that will remain of [my husband] and me. 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.
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If I observe my cats carefully, it is partly because I observe everyone I deal with as carefully as I can and partly because they amuse and entertain me. They are an important part of the fabric of my daily life.
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All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations.
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The body is simple as a turtle / and straight as a dog: / the body cannot lie.