Quotes from Marge Piercy

Walking bores me. I mean, we have to have a goal.

Finally something besides infatuation had focused him. He was no longer merely flowing water.

She felt pride and shame wash through her. Mala, the woman who acted. To thrust herself forward into the world.

Never let them know who you really are, how you live, and that you can observe and think, that was her motto.

Those of your time who fought hard for change, often they had myths that a revolution was inevitable. But nothing is! All things interlock. We are only one possible future

Every day was a lesson in how starved the eyes could grow for hue, for reds and golds; how starved the ears could grow for conga drums, for the blare of traffic, for dogs barking, for the baseball games chattering from TVs, for foices talking flatly, conversationally, with rising excitement in Spanish, for children playing n the streets, the Puerto Rican children whose voices sounded faster, harder, than Chicano Spanish, as if there were more metal in their throats.

Every day was a lesson in how starved the eyes could grow for hue, for reds and golds; how starved the ears could grow for conga drums, for the blare of traffic, for dogs barking, for the baseball games chattering from TVs, for voices talking flatly, conversationally, with rising excitement in Spanish, for children playing in the streets, the Puerto Rican children whose voices sounded faster, harder, than Chicano Spanish, as if there were more metal in their throats.

it seems as if people fought hardest against those who had a little more than themselves or often a little less, instead of the lugs who got richer and richer.

The love of a cat is unconditional but always subject to negotiation. You are never entirely in charge.

I require a hierarchy of priorities after protecting Shira and Malkah and the small felines.

With living creatures / one must begin very early / to dwarf their growth : / the bound feet, / the crippled brain, / the hair curlers, / the hands you / love to touch.

Helpless as a burning city, / how can I ignore that the extremes / of pleasure are fire storms / that leave a vacuum into which / dangerous feelings (tenderness, / affection, l o v e) may rush / like gale force winds.

Variant selves haunt the corridors of my brain, people my novels, crowd in like ghosts drawn to blood when friends or strangers tell me secrets, hand me their troubles, sweaters knit of hair and wire.

People were not getting back what they wanted for their sold labor. Taxes grew and services shrank. Prices rose and quality decayed. Everywhere people felt used and betrayed and coerced and cheated.

But you say you respect difference." "Different strengths we respect. Not weakness. What is the use in not actively engaging life? It passes anyhow. She thought of the asylum. "Sometimes you have no choice.

could give them, not the dutiful, selfish and perfunctory love of an adolescent, but an understanding love that would lighten

thinking about tracking. . . . Sometime in grade school, already your fate was settled, your social class was established for the rest of your life.

subject that got people aroused . . . was Who Owns America? . . . They had a chart going . . . filling in connections between the big local contractors and the steel companies and the city and county governments and the unions . . . and the downtown merchants. . . . They found they still did not know who owned obvious centers of power like the banks. They did not know who owned the local paper. Or the radio stations.

Los Angeles: city that was nothing but a slot machine dispensing plastic toys.

every time a bomb exploded, every anti-personnel weapon that sent its hundreds of particles tearing through the sift tissues of soft bodies, every helicopter that was shot down with its crew, every plane hit with a missile: brrrring, brrrring, on the great cash register in the homeland bank. It was all profit. It would have to be replaced. It was the perfect form of fantastically expensive and forced consumption, paid for by taxes.

He will make any woman happy a little while and then unhappy a long while.

Baby, tonight you're the reason I have lips.

So it goes when we need to couple. Sex makes idiots of us all. ~ From "Am I Pretty Enough

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.