Marge Piercy Quotes - Page 5

With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.

I don't find that writing about parts of my life had much effect except in some cases to improve my memory. To get into parts of the past I want to recall very vividly, I use a form of directed meditation.

The moon is always female and so am I although often in the vale of razorblades I have wished I could put on and take off my sex like a dress and why not?

You are built to pull a cart, to lift a heavy load and bear it, to haul up the long slope, and so am I, peasant bodies, earthy, solid shapely dark glazed clay pots that can stand on the fire.

Too much self-regard has never struck me as dignified: trying to twist over my shoulder to view my own behind.

It's really important to visit a site you are writing about. Even if you know it well, even if you have lived there, it's important to take a fresh look in terms of your characters and your story.

Shall I tell you something I've been noticing? The mistrust this society has for women. All kinds of experts and officials are terrified because so many women are working. They really think that women have to be coerced into having babies and raising kids.

I wasn't afraid of being poor; I rather took it for granted. I was good at getting by with very little. I couldn't imagine sacrificing my writing to anything else.

The incidence of violent brand-loyalty to one's own current dogma has risen.

If sex is a war, I am a conscientious objector: I will not play.

Our wedding plans please everybody as if we were fertilizing the earth and creating social luck.

Your anger was a climate I inhabited like a desert in a dry frigid weather of high thin air and ivory sun, sand dunes the wind lifted into stinging clouds that blinded and choked me where the only ice was in the blood.

Art is a game only if you playat it, a mirror that reflects from the inside out.

The politics of the exile are fever, revenge, daydream, theater of the aging convalescent. You wait in the wings and rehearse. You wait and wait.

Looking at my life was very difficult. I think I learned that I haven't been as good a person as I'm inclined to think of myself as. I haven't been as good friend, haven't been as good a person, made a lot of mistakes.

People are very afraid of any controversy. We've become very passive spectator types. And when the kids were protesting globilization - quite reasonably - they really got bashed.

Sometimes when a character in a novel is difficult for me to enter, I sue something in myself or in my own life as a doorway into that character's mind and emotions.

Long hair is considered bohemian, which may be why I grew it, but I keep it long because I love the way it feels, part cloak, part fan, part mane, part security blanket.

My grandmother was very important to me. She gave me my religious education. She gave me a sense of the female side of Judaism, of the rich store of stories and legends of the women of the schtetl.

Any life is lived in a particular time and place. Every life is impacted by the family's socio-economic circumstances, and, in later life, by the person's.

I think we validate our lives through our actions.

When midlist writers are treated like dirt, I would desist were I less stubborn and less committed.

the body is simple as a turtle / and straight as a dog: / the body cannot lie.

There are obviously a great many ways to organize some fraction of the material in a life.

I think that if you use something from you life in fiction, it metamorphosizes into something strange and different. Afterward it is hard to tell what actually was part of your life and what is part of the story of the fictional character.