Marge Piercy Quotes - Page 4

I'm probably the only novelist who has ever written about political fugitives who actually knew a lot about them, had contact with them, and had a realistic notion of how they survived.

I am my mother's daughter,... I am her only novel.

I communicate much better with cats, usually. I know them and their body language - as my own cats know mine very well. Cats are adept at reading subtle signals.

Nobody can live on a bridge or plant potatoes but it is fine for comings and goings, meetings, partings and long views and a real connection to someplace else where you may in the crazy weathers of struggle how and again want to be.

Grandmother Hannah comes to me at Pesach and when I am lighting the sabbath candles. The sweet wine in the cup has her breath.... a little winter no spring can melt.

Obviously I find women more interesting than men to write about.

We may be losing the ability to understand animals who are not pets or horses. We have less contact with them. We don't (most of us) tend to know even cows and pigs, let alone bears or wolverines or red tailed hawks.

I never thought of myself as explaining cats in general. I simply viewed the cats I have known as characters in my life, often as quirky and complex as the humans with whom I have spent time.

Only when we break the mirror and climb into our vision, only when we are the wind together streaming and singing, only in the dream we become with our bones for spears, we are real at last and wake.

A strong woman is a woman at work, cleaning out the cesspool of the ages, and while she shovels, she talks about how she doesn't mind crying, it opens the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up develops the stomach muscles, and she goes on shoveling with tears in her nose.

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.

Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

Troubles cured you salty as a country ham, smoky to the taste, thick-skinned and tender inside.

The art of fiction is one of constant seduction. You must persuade the reader on page 1 to start reading - on page 50, or page 150 and yes, on page 850.

Love says, mine. Love says, I could eat you up. Love says, stay as you are, be my own private thing, don't you dare have ideas I don't share. Love has just got to gobble the other, bones and all, crunch. I don't want to do that. I sure don't want it done to me!

We live in a media soup and are constantly being programmed or are fighting that programming. Thus any truthful account of a life, every part of a life, is about society as well as an individual.

This life is a war we are not yet winning for our daughters' children. Don't do your enemies' work for them. Finish your own.

Where I came from, the nights I had wandered and survived scared them, and where I would go they never imagined.

It hurts to love wide open stretching the muscles... It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch; to love and let go again and again.

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

The ruling class isn't dissatisfied: they are healthy, well-fed, live in beauty, enjoy their own importance: fun-loving cannibals.

I think having a great range of experiences in my life had helped me as a writer, particularly a writer of fiction. I have known a great many different sorts of people in different situations, and I have a notion how very well of badly people can behave in times of stress or danger or violence.

I am a driven writer. I feel guilty if I don't write, not self-indulgent if I do.

I don't think writers change the past any more than other people do, except in so far as we may mine our lives and change things for fictional use.

If I observe my cats carefully, it is partly because I observe everyone I deal with as carefully as I can and partly because they amuse and entertain me. They are an important part of the fabric of my daily life.