Marge Piercy Quotes

To be a poet is to open your eyes to everything around you. I love the beauty of the world, but I get angry at the cruelty in the world. How can we not get angry at the tremendous cruelty that is built into our system?

"I used to wonder what I did wrong. But now I think that unless you grossly mistreat a child or spoil her or let her be injured, basically there's a given element in all of us, something from genes or the moment. From birth on, a child follows her own path. She learns, but she also unfolds from within." (Malkah, twenty-eight: HOW CAN WE TELL THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE?)

For years she had had this magic circle they could weave about themselves, luminous with Gadi's imagination, the place where she could never be lonely or bored. In that private world of play more intense, far more real than reality, she was whatever she longed for. (five: FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE: THE DAY OF ALEF)

I'm a pluralist in sexuality as in most things. I want people to make many different choices and flourish in them, and to respect the choices they don't make in their own lives as well as those they do.

This was the home she had fled, not from an unhappy childhood but from too early and too intense love, paradise torn. (four: THROUGH THE BURNING LABYRINTH)

"Before you, the strongest feeling I knew was fear." (Yod, twenty-two: THE PRESENT)

[He] felt a controlled importance, a fine passionate honing of his attention and intellect that made him impatient with his whole previous life. (p208)

Religions have done far more damage over the centuries than good. Religion may help individuals to bear hard times and trouble and loss, but institutionalized religion of all stripes quickly becomes dangerous. Established religion always seems to breed a them vs us mentality that has lead to crusades, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, the Inquisition, genocide, civil war, and legal discrimination.

Utopia is born of the hunger for something better, but it relies on hope as the engine for imagining such a future. I wanted to take what I considered the most fruitful ideas of the various movements for social change and make them vivid and concrete – that was the real genesis of Woman on the Edge of Time.

No one before the twenty-first century had ever loved flowers and fruiting trees and little birds and the simple beauty of green leaves as did those who lived after the Famine, for whom they were precious and rare and always endangered. (four: THROUGH THE BURNING LABYRINTH)

The use of women as props for a sagging ego is accepted socially. Everybody sees it and everybody agrees that they don't.

Like species, couples die out or evolve.

We all of us go about, she meant to tell him but was too occupied, wanting to be wanted but unsure why anybody should bother. (twenty-two: THE PRESENT)

For me the gifts of the novelist are empathy and imagination.

Everything to me is connected-religion, the body, politics, our relation to each other and all other living beings, the environment. Life is of a piece. To me it's all one vision, and poetry is at the center.