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.
— Marge Piercy
The most unexpected Marge Piercy quotes you will be delighted to read
Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.
We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.
A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done.
It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.
Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen.
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.
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.
All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations.
Hope sleeps in our bones like a bear waiting for spring to rise and walk.
Remember that every son had a mother whose beloved son he was, and every woman had a mother whose beloved son she wasn't.
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.
I don't even remember what Mother and I quarreled about: it is a continual quarrel that began when I reached puberty.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What a richly colored strong warm coat is woven when love is the warp and work is the woof.
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.
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.
The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.
I mourn in grey, grey as the sleeted wind the bled shades of twilight, gunmetal, battleships, industrial paint.
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.
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.
The incidence of violent brand-loyalty to one's own current dogma has risen.
Troubles cured you salty as a country ham, smoky to the taste, thick-skinned and tender inside.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Shared laughter is erotic too.
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.
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.
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.
I wrote to make sense out of all the contradictions I experienced and to deal with the pain and loss I was undergoing.
Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out.
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.
Every poet has a certain amount of "stuff.
" That's what you draw from for imagery. The more stuff you know well, not simply intellectually but sensually, emotionally, intimately, the wider the pool from which you draw.
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?
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.
When midlist writers are treated like dirt, I would desist were I less stubborn and less committed.
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.
If sex is a war, I am a conscientious objector: I will not play.
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.