Marge Piercy Quotes
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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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The body is simple as a turtle / and straight as a dog: / the body cannot lie.
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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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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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The incidence of violent brand-loyalty to one's own current dogma has risen.
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Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen.
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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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If what we change does not change us we are playing with blocks.
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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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Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream.
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I think we validate our lives through our actions.
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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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The powerful don't make revolutions.
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Obviously I find women more interesting than men to write about.
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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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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.
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Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
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We are trying to live as if we were an experiment conducted by the future.
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Love as if you liked yourself, and it may happen.
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The ruling class isn't dissatisfied: they are healthy, well-fed, live in beauty, enjoy their own importance: fun-loving cannibals.
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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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Love says, mine. Love says, I could eat you up. Love says, stay as you are, be my own private thing, don't you dare have ideas I don't share. Love has just got to gobble the other, bones and all, crunch. I don't want to do that. I sure don't want it done to me!
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Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.
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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.