Marge Piercy Quotes
-
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.
-
The body is simple as a turtle / and straight as a dog: / the body cannot lie.
-
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.
-
The politics of the exile are fever, revenge, daydream, theater of the aging convalescent. You wait in the wings and rehearse. You wait and wait.
-
Only when we break the mirror and climb into our vision, only when we are the wind together streaming and singing, only in the dream we become with our bones for spears, we are real at last and wake.
-
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.
-
Pain is a forcing sieve that turns me to gruel.
-
Now that I am in my forties, she [my mother] tells me I'm beautiful; now that I am in my forties, she sends me presents and we have the long, personal and even remarkably honest phone calls I always wanted so intensely I forbade myself to imagine them. How strange. Perhaps Shaw was correct and if we lived to be several hundred years old, we would finally work it all out. I am deeply grateful. With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.
-
Listening is terribly important if you want to understand anything about people. You listen to what they say and how they say it, what they share and what they are reticent about, what they tell truthfully and what they lie about, what they hope for and what they fear, what they are proud of, what they are ashamed of. If you don't pay attention to other people, how can you understand their choices through time and how their stories come out?
-
Too much self-regard has never struck me as dignified: trying to twist over my shoulder to view my own behind.
-
The people I love the best, jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows.
-
Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen.
-
Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.
-
Our wedding plans please everybody as if we were fertilizing the earth and creating social luck.
-
I don't think writers change the past any more than other people do, except in so far as we may mine our lives and change things for fictional use.
-
The incidence of violent brand-loyalty to one's own current dogma has risen.
-
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.
-
I like communicating with cats. I know them and their body language - as my own cats know mine very well. Cats are adept at reading subtle signals.
-
It's really important to visit a site you are writing about. Even if you know it well, even if you have lived there, it's important to take a fresh look in terms of your characters and your story.
-
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
-
Attention is love, what we must give children, mothers, fathers, pets, our friends, the news, the woes of others. What we want to change we curse and then pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can with eyes and hands and tongue. If you can't bless it, get ready to make it new.
-
Sometimes when a character in a novel is difficult for me to enter, I sue something in myself or in my own life as a doorway into that character's mind and emotions.
-
We lie in each other's arms eyes shut and fingers open and all the colors of the world pass through our bodies like strings of fire.
-
On this twelfth day of my diet I would rather die satiated than slim.