Marge Piercy Quotes
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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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The people I love the best, jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows.
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Looking at my life was very difficult. I think I learned that I haven't been as good a person as I'm inclined to think of myself as. I haven't been as good friend, haven't been as good a person, made a lot of mistakes.
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Our wedding plans please everybody as if we were fertilizing the earth and creating social luck.
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The moon is always female and so am I although often in the vale of razorblades I have wished I could put on and take off my sex like a dress and why not?
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There is no justice we don't make daily like bread and love.
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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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You are built to pull a cart, to lift a heavy load and bear it, to haul up the long slope, and so am I, peasant bodies, earthy, solid shapely dark glazed clay pots that can stand on the fire.
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The mind wraps itself around a poem. It is almost sensual, particularly if you work on a computer. You can turn the poem round and about and upside down, dancing with it a kind of bolero of two snakes twisting and coiling, until the poem has found its right and proper shape.
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I did not always know I would be a writer. Until I had a room of my own, I did not write much at all - no more than any other child who read a lot of books. I began to write fiction and poetry when I first had a room that was truly my own with a door that shut and some measure, however fragile, of privacy.
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Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.
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What a richly colored strong warm coat is woven when love is the warp and work is the woof.
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Everything you study, everything you learn, makes you a better writer, because you have more understanding of how things work.
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Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream.
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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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When I work I am pure as an angel tiger and clear is my eye and hot my brain and silent all the whining grunting piglets of the appetites.
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I wasn't afraid of being poor; I rather took it for granted. I was good at getting by with very little. I couldn't imagine sacrificing my writing to anything else.
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Love as if you liked yourself, and it may happen.
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Remember that every son had a mother whose beloved son he was, and every woman had a mother whose beloved son she wasn't.
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If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening.
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The powerful don't make revolutions.
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I am a driven writer. I feel guilty if I don't write, not self-indulgent if I do.
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A strong woman is a woman at work, cleaning out the cesspool of the ages, and while she shovels, she talks about how she doesn't mind crying, it opens the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up develops the stomach muscles, and she goes on shoveling with tears in her nose.
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Suspense is one of the ways you persuade a reader to become engaged and stay engaged with your work.