Marge Piercy Quotes
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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 pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.
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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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It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.
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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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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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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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Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment.
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When she kissed him, he melted like a lump of milk chocolate.
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I will choose what enters me, what becomes flesh of my flesh. Without choice, no politics, no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield, not your uranium mine, not your calf for fattening, not your cow for milking. You may not use me as your factory. Priests and legislators do not hold shares in my womb or my mind. If I give it to you, I want it back. My life is a non-negotiable demand.
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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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Troubles cured you salty as a country ham, smoky to the taste, thick-skinned and tender inside.
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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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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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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.
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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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We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.
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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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Too much self-regard has never struck me as dignified: trying to twist over my shoulder to view my own behind.
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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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All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations.
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Whatever is not an energy source, is an energy sink.