Marge Piercy Quotes

Each good novel has a vision of its world that informs what is put in and what is left out.

The mind wraps itself around a poem.

Poems start from a phrase, an image, an idea, a rhythm insistent in the back of the brain...Some poems are a journey of discovery and exploration for the writer as well as the reader. I find out where I am going when I finally arrive, which may take years.

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

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.

Attention is love, what we must give
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can't bless it, get ready to make it new.

At that time, a pregnant woman could not get an abortion in Massachusetts -- but a cat could. (p221)

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)

I love silence but I fear emptiness. (p11)

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

In my life, there have been a great many Mr. Wrongs. I married one of them and spent time and energy and emotion on dozens more. My feeling is that in love you are entitled to a great many mistakes so long as you aren't making the same one over and over. (beginning of "The Easy Arrangement")

When the knocking came, Maud was taking a sponge bath. (first line of "The Cost of Lunch, Etc.")

It is by imagining what we truly desire that we begin to go there. That is the kind of thinking about the future that seems to me most fruitful, most rewarding. I want a future in which women are not punished for having women's bodies, are not punished for desire or the lack of it, are viewed as independent protagonists in their own adventures-spiritual, intellectual, romantic, sexual, and creative adventures. That's one reason I read and write speculative fiction.

Utopia is work that issues from pain: it is what we do not have that we crave.

(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.