Marge Piercy is an American poet, novelist, and social activist. Her work includes Woman on the Edge of Time; He, She and It, which won the 1993 Arthur C. Clarke Award; and Gone to Soldiers, a New York Times Best Seller, a sweeping historical novel set during World War II. These Marge Piercy quotes will motivate you.
Best Marge Piercy Quotes
- “Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “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.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “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.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “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.” ~ Marge Piercy -
“There is no justice we don’t make daily like bread and love.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “Hope sleeps in our bones like a bear waiting for spring to rise and walk.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “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.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “The best gift you can give is a hug: one size fits all and no one ever minds if you return it.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “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?” ~ Marge Piercy
- “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.” ~ Marge Piercy
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“Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “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.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “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.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, love with the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the windroaring and whimpering in the rooms.” ~ Marge Piercy
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“If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment. All that remains of my mother is what I remember and what I have written for and about her. Eventually that is all that will remain of [my husband] and me. 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.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “Every Jewish holiday has a religious significance, a historical significance, and a relevance to the time of year in the natural calendar of the seasons and trees and growing things, as well as a personal significance. So you are always looking backward, outward, inward and forward.” ~ Marge Piercy
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“If what we change does not change us we are playing with blocks.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “I was a working class Jewish girl. In my girlhood, anti-Semitism was a daily fact of life in Detroit. I did not come from people who had many options in their lives or many choices open to them. I was a girl in a family in which women were, as in society at large, very much second-class citizens. I did not see why I should accept these forced limitations without a fight. Being free to make my own choices thus became very important to me at an early age.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “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.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “Every baby born
unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come
due in twenty years with interest, an anger
that must find a target, a pain that will
beget pain. A decade downstream a child
screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,
a firing squad is summoned, a button
is pushed and the world burns.” ~ Marge Piercy - “I stayed under the moon too long. I am silvered with lust. Dreams flick like minnows through my eyes. My voice is trees tossing in the wind. I lose myself like a flock of blackbirdsstorming into your face. My lightest touch leaves blue prints,bruises on your mind.Desire sandpapers your skinso thin I read the veins and arteriesmaps of routes I will traveltill I lodge in your spine. The night is our fur. We curl inside it licking.” ~ Marge Piercy
