Quotes from Marge Piercy

she had ordered a turkey from the Garfinkles, who raised them.

The need exists. I serve the need. After me the need will exist and the need will be served. Let me do well what has and will be done as well by others. Let me take on the role and then let it go.

Whenever the balance of power was unequal, there was a driver and a driven. Power was the lethal vice, the turn-on with evil built into it, because it required a victim to manifest itself. Power implied subject and object. They needed some way to recognize (for everyone to recognize) that everybody was a subject.

A strong woman is a woman who craves love like oxygen or she turns blue choking. A strong woman is a woman who loves strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong in words, in action, in connection, in feeling; she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

i find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people

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.

We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding, the third

A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done

It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.

The anger of the weak never goes away, Professor, it just gets a little moldy. It molds like a beautiful blue cheese in the dark, growing stronger, and more interesting. The poor and the weak die with all their anger intact and probably those angers go on growing in the dark of the grave like the hair and the nails.

In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry, a yam of a woman of butter and brass

Writing sometimes feels frivolous and sometimes sacred, but memory is one of my strongest muses. I serve her with my words. So long as people read, those we love survive however evanescently. As do we writers, saying with our life's work, Remember . Remember us. Remember me.

Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream.

Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment.

The powerful don't make revolutions

Nobody hates us as ourselves. In their minds we're not human... They don't hate us because we did something or said something. They make us stand for an evil they invent and then they want to kill it in us.

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

The societies kids naturally form are tribal. Gangs, clubs, packs. But we're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb.

I said, I like my life. If I have to give it back, if they take it from me, let me not feel I wasted any, let me not feel I forgot to love anyone I meant to love, that I forgot to give what I held in my hands, that I forgot to do some little piece of the work that wanted to come through.

Hate them more than you hate yourself, and you'll stay free!

I will choose what enters me, what becomes of my flesh. Without choice, no politics, no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield, not your uranium mine, not your calf for fattening, not your cow for milking. You may not use me as your factory. Priests and legislators do not hold shares in my womb or my mind. This is my body. If I give it to you I want it back. My life is a non-negotiable demand.

The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.