Quotes from Marge Piercy

We spend more time doing dishes than we do making love, but which figures prominently in the story of our lives?

A little man in a threadbare coat spoke up for the poor as if he really knew what he was talking about. The women with the flowers threw them down for him. "That's Robert Speer," one said. "Something like that. He's our man.

Daniel felt a controlled importance, a fine passionate honing of his attention and intellect that made him impatient with his whole previous life.

I love silence but I fear emptiness.

True goodness is like water. Water helps the ten thousand things without itself striving. Water flows down into the low places men despise, for water is in the Way

I am still that child. I eavesdrop on the conversations of strangers in restaurants, in airports and supermarkets. I drive my husband crazy with questions sometimes; but I am still a good listener and I still keep secrets.

After I saw Fantasia (the only Walt Disney movie I saw, as my mother considered it culture; otherwise we boycotted because my mother called him a fascist and a union breaker) . . .

All day you have been on my mind A seagull perched on an old wharf piling by the steely grip of its claws shrieking when any other comes too near waiting for fish or what the tide brings shaking out its long white wings like laundry. All day you have been on my mind a thrift store glamour hat that doesn't fit with a perky veil scratching my cheek with a feather hanging down like a broken tail.

I swear to you, although it defies logic, that at least one cat always knows when it's Saturday morning and she's entitled to tuna.

I fell into seed and nursery catalogs, discovering a new addiction I have never recovered from. Indeed, I feel quite virtuous when, reading a catalog with 150 old-fashioned and species roses in it, I order only fourteen.

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

People danced a lot then. I miss that.

He likes to complain. It feels natural to him. He was unhappy a long time, and complaining makes him feel as if he's warding off greater evil.

It was not that I did not miss Arofa. To this day, I dream about her. I kept seeing her ghost. But I have always believed that if you love a pet, when they die, you find a pet who needs a home, and that is how you show your love. To me, giving love to new cats commemorated her in the only way that mattered.

I realized Grant would not say kaddish for her, so I did, for the next year. As I was reciting the words, which were nonsense to me, day after day, just rhythmic syllables, I began to realize I needed to learn Hebrew. It was maddening and embarrassing that I had no idea at all what I was saying every day, facing east and thinking of my mother whose face I would never see again except in dreams -- in dreams again and again.

In the death of every creature we have loved, we taste our own.

You who had not been allowed to finish tenth grade but sent to be a frightened chambermaid, carried home every week armloads of books from the library rummaging them late at night, insomniac, riffling the books like boxes of chocolates searching for the candied cherries, the nuts, hunting for the secrets, the formulae, the knowledge those others learned that made them shine and never ache.

Only rebellion flashes like lightning.

In my childhood bed we float, your sweet husky voice singing about the crescent moon, with two horns sharp and bright we would climb into like a boat and row away and see, you sang, where the pretty moon goes.

They found the library sadly lacking in texts they could use.

they were in love with apocalypse, like all men, more in love with myths than with any woman.

It's the last great free-for-all robbery of everybody's earth.

Drifting with things is a habit it takes almost dying to break.

There is a bird in my chest with wings too broad with beak that rips me wanting to get out. I have called it an idiot parrot. I have called it a ravening eagle. But it sings. Bird of no name your cries are red and wet on the iron air. I open my mouth to let you out and your shining blinds me.