Marge Piercy Quotes
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Art is a game only if you playat it, a mirror that reflects from the inside out.
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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.
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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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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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Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.
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Pain is a forcing sieve that turns me to gruel.
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History is a game played backwards only.
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The incidence of violent brand-loyalty to one's own current dogma has risen.
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The people I love the best, jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows.
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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.
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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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All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations.
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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.
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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.
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If what we change does not change us we are playing with blocks.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen.
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I think we validate our lives through our actions.
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On this twelfth day of my diet I would rather die satiated than slim.
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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?
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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.
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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.