110+ Marge Piercy Quotes On Friendship, Water And Be Of Use

Marge Piercy was an American poet, novelist, and social activist. She was known for her works on feminism and her poetry collections, including Circles on the Water and The Moon is Always Female. Her 1974 novel Woman on the Edge of Time was a pioneering work in the feminist science fiction genre. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Marge Piercy on life, love, friendship.

Top 10 Marge Piercy Quotes

1. We must shine with hope, stained glass windows that shape light into icons, glow like lanterns borne before a procession. Who can bear hope back into the world but us.
2. Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.
3. We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.
4. A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done.
5. It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.
6. Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen.
7. Long hair is considered bohemian, which may be why I grew it, but I keep it long because I love the way it feels, part cloak, part fan, part mane, part security blanket.
8. All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations.
9. Hope sleeps in our bones like a bear waiting for spring to rise and walk.
10. Remember that every son had a mother whose beloved son he was, and every woman had a mother whose beloved son she wasn't.

Marge Piercy Short Quotes

• My strength and my weakness are twins in the same womb.
• The best gift you can give is a hug: one size fits all and no one ever minds if you return it.
• The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.
• Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.
• In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry, a yam of a woman of butter and brass.
• Sleeping together is a euphemism for people, but tantamount to marriage with cats.
• Troubles cured you salty as a country ham, smoky to the taste, thick-skinned and tender inside.
• The incidence of violent brand-loyalty to one's own current dogma has risen.
• Shared laughter is erotic too.
• When midlist writers are treated like dirt, I would desist were I less stubborn and less committed.

Marge Piercy Quotes About Life

With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life. — Marge Piercy

If I observe my cats carefully, it is partly because I observe everyone I deal with as carefully as I can and partly because they amuse and entertain me. They are an important part of the fabric of my daily life. — Marge Piercy

We live in a media soup and are constantly being programmed or are fighting that programming. Thus any truthful account of a life, every part of a life, is about society as well as an individual. — Marge Piercy

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. — Marge Piercy

I think having a great range of experiences in my life had helped me as a writer, particularly a writer of fiction. I have known a great many different sorts of people in different situations, and I have a notion how very well of badly people can behave in times of stress or danger or violence. — Marge Piercy

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. — Marge Piercy

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

There are obviously a great many ways to organize some fraction of the material in a life. — 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

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. — Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy Quotes About Love

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

What a richly colored strong warm coat is woven when love is the warp and work is the woof. — 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

It hurts to love wide open stretching the muscles... It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch; to love and let go again and again. — Marge Piercy

Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, love with the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the windroaring and whimpering in the rooms. — Marge Piercy

There is no justice we don't make daily like bread and love. — Marge Piercy

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

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! — Marge Piercy

The people I love the best, jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows. — 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

Marge Piercy Quotes About Be Of Use

We admire predators - panthers, lions, tigers, even wolves. Maybe to be naturally thoughtful and hesitant to use violence is to be somehow second rate. To be in the middle of the social food chain. Especially if you're a man. This society thinks real men are violent. — Marge Piercy

The will to be totally rational is the will to be made out of glass and steel: and to use others as if they were glass and steel. — Marge Piercy

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. — Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy Famous Quotes And Sayings

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen: reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in. This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always, for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes. — Marge Piercy

A new idea is rarely born like Venus attended by graces. More commonly it's modeled of baling wire and acne. More commonly it wheezes and tips over. — Marge Piercy

I don't even remember what Mother and I quarreled about: it is a continual quarrel that began when I reached puberty. — Marge Piercy

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. — Marge Piercy

We're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb. — Marge Piercy

Purple as tulips in May, mauve into lush velvet, purple as the stain blackberries leave on the lips, on the hands, the purple of ripe grapes sunlit and warm as flesh. — Marge Piercy

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. — Marge Piercy

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. — Marge Piercy

I mourn in grey, grey as the sleeted wind the bled shades of twilight, gunmetal, battleships, industrial paint. — Marge Piercy

The sense of being Jewish never left me, but when my grandmother died, I rebelled against Judaism as I knew it then, which was Orthodox. I saw the rituals, a lot of them, as very male, for a long time. — Marge Piercy

Suppose that a person writes what she must. That is only the first step of becoming a writer. The work must survive the moment of creation. It must get out to an audience. She or he must dare to show the work. She must risk ridicule, misunderstanding, scandal, condemnation, & what's often worse, none of the above: silence. No attention at all. — Marge Piercy

I have no connections here; only gusty collisions, rootless seedlings forced into bloom, that collapse. ... I am the Visiting Poet: a real unicorn, a wind-up plush dodo, a wax museum of the Movement. People want to push the buttons and see me glow. — Marge Piercy

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. — Marge Piercy

The anger of the weak never goes away, Professor, it just gets a little moldy. It molds like a beautiful blue cheese in the dark, growing stronger, and more interesting. The poor and the weak die with all their anger intact and probably those angers go on growing in the dark of the grave like the hair and the nails. — Marge Piercy

My idea of Hell is to be young again. — Marge Piercy

The powerful don't make revolutions — Marge Piercy

Shall I tell you something I've been noticing? The mistrust this society has for women. All kinds of experts and officials are terrified because so many women are working. They really think that women have to be coerced into having babies and raising kids. — Marge Piercy

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. — Marge Piercy

Like species, couples die out or evolve. — Marge Piercy

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. — Marge Piercy

I stayed under the moon too long.I am silvered with lust.Dreams flick like minnows through my eyes.My voice is trees tossing in the wind.I loose myself like a flock of blackbirdsstorming into your face.My lightest touch leaves blue prints,bruises on your mind.Desire sandpapers your skinso thin I read the veins and arteriesmaps of routes I will traveltill I lodge in your spine.The night is our fur.We curl inside it licking. — Marge Piercy

The work of the world is common as mud. — Marge Piercy

If what we change does not change us we are playing with blocks. — Marge Piercy

Praise our choices, sister, for each doorway open to us was taken by squads of fighting women who paid years of trouble and struggle, who paid their wombs, their sleep, their lives that we might walk through these gates upright. Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out. Freedom is our real abundance. — Marge Piercy

The real writer is one who really writes. — Marge Piercy

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. — Marge Piercy

Suspense is one of the ways you persuade a reader to become engaged and stay engaged with your work. — Marge Piercy

Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved. — Marge Piercy

People are very afraid of any controversy. We've become very passive spectator types. And when the kids were protesting globilization - quite reasonably - they really got bashed. — Marge Piercy

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

Nobody can live on a bridge or plant potatoes but it is fine for comings and goings, meetings, partings and long views and a real connection to someplace else where you may in the crazy weathers of struggle how and again want to be. — Marge Piercy

the body is simple as a turtle / and straight as a dog: / the body cannot lie. — Marge Piercy

One of the best gifts you can give a poet is to present them with field guides - to rocks, to stars, to birds, to wildflowers, to trees and bushes, to butterflies, to reptiles and amphibians. Because when you look at anything long enough to be able to identify it, you see far more clearly and you make a tiny beginning at understanding the life, the place, the history of that bird or rock or mammal. — Marge Piercy

I will choose what enters me, what becomes flesh of my flesh. Without choice, no politics, no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield, not your uranium mine, not your calf for fattening, not your cow for milking. You may not use me as your factory. Priests and legislators do not hold shares in my womb or my mind. If I give it to you, I want it back. My life is a non-negotiable demand. — Marge Piercy

Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream. — Marge Piercy

Our wedding plans please everybody as if we were fertilizing the earth and creating social luck. — Marge Piercy

When she kissed him, he melted like a lump of milk chocolate. — Marge Piercy

Never doubt that you can change history. You already have. — Marge Piercy

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. — Marge Piercy

We are trying to live as if we were an experiment conducted by the future — Marge Piercy

Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment. — 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

I'm probably the only novelist who has ever written about political fugitives who actually knew a lot about them, had contact with them, and had a realistic notion of how they survived. — Marge Piercy

I communicate much better with cats, usually. I know them and their body language - as my own cats know mine very well. Cats are adept at reading subtle signals. — Marge Piercy

i find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people — Marge Piercy

Depressions, local and larger strikes, boom times, wars, repressions, all impact a life as do epidemics such as AIDS and pollution that may take years off a person's life. We all, whether we like it or not and whether we acknowledge it or not, are impacted by the racial attitudes we carry within us, and experience in some form every time we turn on the television, the radio, go to a movie, read a magazine or a newspaper, or walk down the street. — Marge Piercy

Art is a game only if you playat it, a mirror that reflects from the inside out. — Marge Piercy

I am my mother's daughter,... I am her only novel. — 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

The art of fiction is one of constant seduction. You must persuade the reader on page 1 to start reading - on page 50, or page 150 and yes, on page 850. — Marge Piercy

I don't apologize for being sexually adventurous. Why not? It was often fun. When it wasn't - I didn't continue what wasn't pleasant. — Marge Piercy

If sex is a war, I am a conscientious objector: I will not play. — Marge Piercy

The price of seeing is silence. — Marge Piercy

History is a game played backwards only. — Marge Piercy

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. — Marge Piercy

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

Everything you study, everything you learn, makes you a better writer, because you have more understanding of how things work. — Marge Piercy

Every Jewish holiday has a religious significance, a historical significance, and a relevance to the time of year in the natural calendar of the seasons and trees and growing things, as well as a personal significance. So you are always looking backward, outward, inward and forward. — Marge Piercy

I think we validate our lives through our actions. — Marge Piercy

Nobody hates us as ourselves. In their minds we're not human... They don't hate us because we did something or said something. They make us stand for an evil they invent and then they want to kill it in us. — Marge Piercy

Where I came from, the nights I had wandered and survived scared them, and where I would go they never imagined. — Marge Piercy

We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves. — Marge Piercy

If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening. — Marge Piercy

I said, I like my life. If Ihave to give it back, if theytake it from me, let me onlynot feel I wasted any, let menot feel I forgot to love anyoneI meant to love, that I forgotto give what I held in my hands,that I forgot to do some littlepiece of the work that wantedto come through. — Marge Piercy

Memory in Greek mythology is the mother of the muses, and it is so for me. Both personal and societal memory move me strongly, and that is one of the sources of my writing. — Marge Piercy

Whatever is not an energy source, is an energy sink. — Marge Piercy

I never thought of myself as explaining cats in general. I simply viewed the cats I have known as characters in my life, often as quirky and complex as the humans with whom I have spent time. — Marge Piercy

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. — 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

Life Lessons by Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy encourages readers to take risks and follow their dreams. She believes in the power of self-expression and encourages readers to find their own voice. She also emphasizes the importance of understanding and accepting one's own limitations, and of embracing the beauty of imperfection.