Quotes by Marge Piercy

“Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third”

“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.”

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

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

“Sleeping together is a euphemism for people, but tantamount to marriage with cats”

“It you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening”

“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”

“All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations.”

“Shared laughter is erotic too”

“You can point out to people how to make what they do better, but you cant teach somebody how to be a great writer, just like you cant teach somebody how to be a fast runner. You can work on their technique, but either theyre fast or theyre not; either they can write or they cant.”

“I think a lot of unpublished writers feel the same way. Theyre not getting anywhere, and nobodys listening to them. You do get frustrated.”

“It isnt premarital sex if you have no intention of getting married”

To Have Without Holding:Learning to love differently is hard,love with the hands wide open, lovewith the doors banging on their hinges,the cupboard unlocked, the windroaring and whimpering in the roomsrustling the sheets and snapping the blindsthat thwack like rubber bandsin an open palm.It hurts to love wide openstretching the muscles that feelas if they are made of wet plaster,then of blunt knives, thenof sharp knives.It hurts to thwart the reflexesof grab, of clutch, to love and letgo again and again. It pesters to rememberthe lover who is not in the bed,to hold back what is owed to the workthat gutters like a candle in a cavewithout air, to love consciously,conscientiously, concretely, constructively.I cant do it, you say its killingme, but you thrive, you glowon the street like a neon raspberry,You float and sail, a helium balloonbright bachelors buttons blue and bobbingon the cold and hot winds of our breath,as we make and unmake in passionatediastole and systole the rhythmof our unbound bonding, to haveand not to hold, to lovewith minimized malice, hungerand anger moment by moment balanced.

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.

thinking about tracking. . . . Sometime in grade school, already your fate was settled, your socialclass was established for the rest of your life.

subject that got people aroused . . . was Who Owns America? . . . They had a chart going . . . filling in connections between the big local contractors and the steel companies and the city and county governments and the unions . . . and the downtown merchants. . . . They found they still did not know who owned obvious centers of power like the banks. They did not know who owned the local paper. Or the radio stations.

I want to do something very important. Like fly into the past and make it come out right.

In fiction, I exercise my nosiness. I am as curious as my cats, and indeed that has led to trouble often enough and used up several of my nine lives. I am an avid listener. I am fascinated by other peoples lives, the choices they make and how that works out through time, what they have done and left undone, what they tell me and what they keep secret and silent, what they lie about and what they confess, what they are proud of and what shames them, what they hope for and what they fear. The source of my fiction is the desire to understand people and their choices through time.

Where do dreams come from?...they slink out of books, they lurk in the stacks of libraries. Out of pages turned they rise like the scent of peonies and infect the brain with their promises.