Marge Piercy Quotes

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

We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.

We must shine with hope, stained glass windows that shape light into icons, glow like lanterns borne before a procession. Who can bear hope back into the world but us.

I will choose what enters me, what becomes flesh 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. If I give it to you, I want it back. My life is a non-negotiable demand.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen: reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in. This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always, for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

The powerful don't make revolutions

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

Whatever is not an energy source, is an energy sink.

Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out.

Hope sleeps in our bones like a bear waiting for spring to rise and walk.

The best gift you can give is a hug: one size fits all and no one ever minds if you return it.

Listening is terribly important if you want to understand anything about people. You listen to what they say and how they say it, what they share and what they are reticent about, what they tell truthfully and what they lie about, what they hope for and what they fear, what they are proud of, what they are ashamed of. If you don't pay attention to other people, how can you understand their choices through time and how their stories come out?

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

Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen.

Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.

We are trying to live as if we were an experiment conducted by the future

Praise our choices, sister, for each doorway open to us was taken by squads of fighting women who paid years of trouble and struggle, who paid their wombs, their sleep, their lives that we might walk through these gates upright. Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out. Freedom is our real abundance.

The people I love the best, jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows.

Every poet has a certain amount of "stuff." That's what you draw from for imagery. The more stuff you know well, not simply intellectually but sensually, emotionally, intimately, the wider the pool from which you draw.

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.

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

If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening.

My strength and my weakness are twins in the same womb.

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.

What a richly colored strong warm coat is woven when love is the warp and work is the woof.