Marge Piercy, from a working-class family in Detroit, was the first in her family to go to college. Her first husband was a physicist and anti-war activist. She divorced him, focused on her writing and politics for some years, married again, expanded from poetry to the novel Small Changes which became a feminist consciousness-raising classic, and began to gain more public recognition and acclaim. She is married to her third husband, Ira Wood, gardens, and continues to write.
Selected Marge Piercy Quotations
• Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.
• Love as if you liked yourself, and it may happen.
• In an elitist world, it's always "women and children last."
• A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done.
• All women hustle. Women watch faces, voices, gestures, moods. The person who has to survive through cunning.
• All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations.
• Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out.
• We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.
• Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
• The will to be totally rational is the will to be made out of glass and steel: and to use others as if they were glass and steel.
• The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.
• Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.
• What a richly colored strong warm coat is woven when love is the warp and work is the woof.
• Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.
• Remember that every son had a mother whose beloved son he was, and every woman had a mother whose beloved son she wasn't.
• 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.
• We are trying to live as if we were an experiment conducted by the future.
• Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.
• My strength and my weakness are twins in the same womb.
• It you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening.
• My idea of Hell is to be young again.
• A new idea is rarely born like Venus attended by graces. More commonly it's modeled of baling wire and acne. More commonly it wheezes and tips over.
• 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.
• With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.
• I mourn in grey, grey as the sleeted wind the bled shades of twilight, gunmetal, battleships, industrial paint.
• 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.
• It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.
• Sleeping together is a euphemism for people, but tantamount to marriage with cats.
• Shared laughter is erotic too.
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About These Quotes
Quote collection assembled by Jone Johnson Lewis. Each quotation page in this collection and the entire collection © Jone Johnson Lewis 1997-2010. This is an informal collection assembled over many years. I regret that I am not be able to provide the original source if it is not listed with the quote.
Citation information:
Jone Johnson Lewis. "Marge Piercy Quotes." About Women's History. URL: http://womenshistory.about.com/od/quotes/a/marge_piercy.htm . Date accessed: (today). (More on how to cite online sources including this page)
