Marge Piercy Quotes

Holy is the hand that works for peace and for justice,
holy is the mouth that speaks for goodness,
holy is the foot that walks toward mercy.

"I still have insomnia, but now I tell myself stories instead of counting men." (Malkah nine: REVISING THE FAMILY ALBUM)

She felt as if she were seventeen again, ignorant, fearful, a creature all gusty emotions and pain. (eight: HOW SHALL I ADDRESS YOU?)

A tendency to believe quite literally in the rhetoric of Movement males is a form of naiveté that no woman can afford.

I love silence but I fear emptiness. (p11)

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

Repression brings hardening.

Malkah's love was strong but abrasive, scrubbing her clean. Gadi's love bore both roses and thorns... (five: FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE: THE DAY OF ALEF)

"There's too little pleasant in this nasty dying world. We all need to remember how to play, how to be children together for a little while." (Gadi, twenty-eight: HOW CAN WE TELL THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE?)

Poetry was a way of keeping myself relatively sane and trying to make sense of the world I inhabited, which did not correspond to the world shown on the television we acquired the year we moved or the world that textbooks and school commended to us. The place I had grown up in was far more violent. Radical politics made sense to me. ("TOUCHED BY GINSBERG AT A (RELATIVELY) TENDER AGE")

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

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

Who wants equality? Those who do not have it.

Most of life was bizarre when she stopped to examine it. (twenty-eight: HOW CAN WE TELL THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE?)

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)