Marge Piercy Quotes

Repression brings hardening.

Like many women, Daria both loved her mother and prayed not to become her. Often Daria felt helpless before her mother Nina's woes, yet her first impulse was to reassure herself: I am different. I have a good and faithful husband, I have my own work, I live in a beautiful house, I like my life. Misery was not hereditary or contagious. Since the plane had taken off late from Chicago, Daria had been dividing her time between worrying about her younger daughter Tracy, who had gone away to college for the first time, and Nina, who had sounded more depressed and lonely than usual on the phone last night. Was Nina really sick? Or just unhappy?

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)

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.

"...you have a reciprocal nature. You understand if you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening." (p343)

I love silence but I fear emptiness. (p11)

People had gone too far in destroying the earth, and now the earth was diminishing the number of people. (fourteen: BY THE LIGHT OF THE UNYELLOW MOON)

"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?)

From the time I arrived on the Cape, one of the things I chose explicitly was to put my writing first. Everything else in my life waxed and waned, but writing, I discovered during my restructuring, was my real core. (p218)

Lots of people are angry and just can't figure out where to aim their anger. We forget how to do anything political. Every generation has to start all over again-people have to figure out what's happened, but you have to start with two, three at a time, and organize. In the meantime, we need the poems-if not for the politicians then for the people the politicians ignore.

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.

there is no justice we don't make daily
like bread and love.

"Some people go on wanting [sex] as long as they live, but other people, they let it go as if it were a garment that had worn out." (Malkah, nine: REVISING THE FAMILY ALBUM)

As if a wind that had been blowing hard against her had suddenly fallen silent, her ears roared with silence. ("What the Arbor Said")

(about putting time into trying to look young) It is certainly a replacement for educating your mind, developing your interests, becoming closer to other people. If you spent the amount of time a week you might spend on the pursuit of a prepubescent body on learning a foreign language, on writing something meaningful to yourself and to others, on practicing piano, on changing the society-this country would be a far different place.