Quotes from Marge Piercy

The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Children always wanted their parents in situ, in stasis. The faster they changed, the more their parents should remain the same.

When will women not be compelled to view their bodies as science projects, gardens to be weeded, dogs to be trained? When will a woman cease to be made of pain?

Only in us do the dead live. Water flows downhill through us. The sun cools in our bones. We are joined with all living in one singing web of energy. In us live the dead who made us. In us live the children unborn. Breathing each other's air, drinking each other's water, eating each other's flesh, we grow like a tree from the earth.

I stayed under the moon too long. I am silvered with lust. Dreams flick like minnows through my eyes. My voice is trees tossing in the wind. I loose myself like a flock of blackbirds storming into your face. My lightest touch leaves blue prints, bruises on your mind. Desire sandpapers your skin so thin I read the veins and arteries maps of routes I will travel till I lodge in your spine. The night is our fur. We curl inside it licking.

Her life seemed to her a great engineering work scarcely begun. Lately more excavation than construction had occurred. She had lost a sense of her own invincibility. In that way she was no longer archetypically American.

The point of creating futures is to get people to imagine what they want and don't want to happen down the road – and maybe do something about it.

Writing implies faith in someone listening,/ different in content but not need/ from the child who cries in the night./ Making is an attack on dying, on chaos,/ on blind inertia, on the second law/ of thermodynamics, on indifference, on cold,/ on contempt, on the silence/ that does not follow the chord resolved,/ the sentence spoken, but the something/ that cannot be said.

Don't be ridiculous! You waste less time than anyone I know.' 'You don't know, sweetie. For years I've had down days. Days I just can't cope. Can't get on with anything. Can't get up and out or at it or whatever.' 'Not enough to keep you from being invaluable politically.

I want to do something very important. Like fly into the past and make it come out right.

When I was a child, I first noticed that neither history as I was taught it nor the stories I was told seemed to lead to me. I began to fix them.

We are not different nor alike But each strange in his leather body sealed in skin and reaching out clumsy hands and loving is an act that cannot outlive the open hand the open eye the door in the chest standing open.

All day you have been on my mind, a steam iron pressing the convolutions from my cortex, ironing me flat. Worrying cooks my cells feverish. I am irritable with love boiling into anxiety, till I grow furious with you, lying under the surgeon's knife.

An new idea is rarely born like Venus attended by graces. More commonly it's modeled of baling wire and acne. More commonly it wheezes and tips over.

If what we change does not change us, we are playing with blocks.

No, It's not fair. But I was thinking more along the lines of the Pentagon and Washington itself. Sometimes I suspect that those who are running things might grow addicted to power. Secrecy's essential in wartime, but once in place, will it ever be removed?

Good will starts out fat and sweet as tub butter and turns slowly rancid. It must be made again daily if we want it fresh.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again.

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. Not any relationship. Not any love. Not any person. I had become more selfish and less accessible. I ceased to be the universal mommy of the tribe. I wanted to see people when I was done with my writing for the day, and not in the middle of my work time.

But I think we often settle for sex when we want love. And we often want love when we need something else, like a good job or a chance to go back to school.

She would not be robbed of her ability to support herself, to do good work in the world, justly, compassionately.

Where do dreams come from? ...they slink out of books, they lurk in the stacks of libraries. Out of pages turned they rise like the scent of peonies and infect the brain with their promises.

She had been swimming in a big pink aquarium, and she never thought that somebody would come along with a hammer and break it until she was gasping for her life and everything she had taken for granted, for permanent, was gone.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground