Marge Piercy Quotes

"He said to me once he had given up a normal life for the cyborgs. As if he could only create life if he gave up loving and living." (Yod about Avram, twenty-eight: HOW CAN WE TELL THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE?)

His body was a city, vast, filling her head. (five: FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE: THE DAY OF ALEF)

Feminist utopias were created out of a hunger for what we didn’t have, at a time when change felt not only possible but probable. Utopias came from the desire to imagine a better society when we dared to do so.

My political ideas changed when feminism of the second wave developed. I had read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex partly in French, then far more easily in English as soon as it came out. But there was almost no context then for my feminist leanings until in 1967, we began to organize in women’s liberation. I learned a lot from Marxism but probably lean more toward syndicalist anarchism

I’ve always felt that in order to change things, you have to understand the forces and choices that created the PRESENT, therefore I write about times in the past that I find very relevant.

Poems told me there were other people who felt the way I felt. That was validation for the person I was. Poems can mean survival.

The noise from outside broke loud and sudden, as if somebody had begun cutting a superhighway through the woods. Dinah's first reaction was fury. Bounding up, she spilled her coffee right into the lap of the black velvet robe Susan had made for her. A chain saw screeched nasally but she heard something growlier under it.

The reason I am political is because I want there to be a juster apportionment of the world's pleasure and less unjust apportionment of the world's pain. Power per se is fairly uninteresting to me, except as I observe it distorting peoples' characters.

just as politically when there is no vocabulary for discussing your situation, when you're a woman before there is language of feminism, trying to understand what it's like to be a woman, you have no concepts, no vocabulary for even understanding your own situation.

I love silence but I fear emptiness. (p11)

Reconstructionism, which is my branch of Judaism, is strongly concerned with the environment

Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream. (p67)

Often I imagine in different and better times not have to be political. I can even imagine, when I am at the bottom of a long uphill grade, doing something besides writing novels, although I doubt it. But I never imagine living without poetry.

He fought her with full energy and intelligence, as she had wanted to be loved. (one: IN THE CORPORATE FORTRESS)

Connie got up from her kitchen table and walked slowly to the door. Either I saw him or I didn't and I'm crazy for real this time, she thought. (first lines)