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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.
Marge Piercy -
Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.
Marge Piercy
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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.
Marge Piercy -
Too much self-regard has never struck me as dignified: trying to twist over my shoulder to view my own behind.
Marge Piercy -
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.
Marge Piercy -
Pain is a forcing sieve that turns me to gruel.
Marge Piercy -
Troubles cured you salty as a country ham, smoky to the taste, thick-skinned and tender inside.
Marge Piercy -
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.
Marge Piercy
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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.
Marge Piercy -
I think we validate our lives through our actions.
Marge Piercy -
If what we change does not change us we are playing with blocks.
Marge Piercy -
The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.
Marge Piercy -
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?
Marge Piercy -
I wrote to make sense out of all the contradictions I experienced and to deal with the pain and loss I was undergoing.
Marge Piercy
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My grandmother was very important to me. She gave me my religious education. She gave me a sense of the female side of Judaism, of the rich store of stories and legends of the women of the schtetl.
Marge Piercy -
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.
Marge Piercy -
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.
Marge Piercy -
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.
Marge Piercy -
All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations.
Marge Piercy -
Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen.
Marge Piercy
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There is no justice we don't make daily like bread and love.
Marge Piercy -
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.
Marge Piercy -
The ruling class isn't dissatisfied: they are healthy, well-fed, live in beauty, enjoy their own importance: fun-loving cannibals.
Marge Piercy -
We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.
Marge Piercy