Top 100 Marge Piercy Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Hope sleeps in our bones like a bear waiting for spring to rise and walk.”

— Marge Piercy

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

— Marge Piercy

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

— Marge Piercy

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

— Marge Piercy

5. “The best gift you can give is a hug: one size fits all and no one ever minds if you return it.”

— Marge Piercy

6. “My strength and my weakness are twins in the same womb.”

— Marge Piercy

7. “The people I love the best, jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows.”

— Marge Piercy

8. “If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening.”

— Marge Piercy

9. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

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

— Marge Piercy

11. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

12. “The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.”

— Marge Piercy

13. “I like communicating with cats. I know them and their body language – as my own cats know mine very well. Cats are adept at reading subtle signals.”

— Marge Piercy

14. “If what we change does not change us we are playing with blocks.”

— Marge Piercy

15. “I mourn in grey, grey as the sleeted wind the bled shades of twilight, gunmetal, battleships, industrial paint.”

— Marge Piercy

16. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

17. “We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.”

— Marge Piercy

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

21. “Memory in Greek mythology is the mother of the muses, and it is so for me. Both personal and societal memory move me strongly, and that is one of the sources of my writing.”

— Marge Piercy

22. “Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.”

— Marge Piercy

23. “Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out.”

— Marge Piercy

24. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

25. “Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.”

— Marge Piercy

26. “Attention is love, what we must give children, mothers, fathers, pets, our friends, the news, the woes of others. What we want to change we curse and then pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can with eyes and hands and tongue. If you can’t bless it, get ready to make it new.”

— Marge Piercy

27. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

28. “We admire predators – panthers, lions, tigers, even wolves. Maybe to be naturally thoughtful and hesitant to use violence is to be somehow second rate. To be in the middle of the social food chain. Especially if you’re a man. This society thinks real men are violent.”

— Marge Piercy

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

— Marge Piercy

30. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

31. “We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.”

— Marge Piercy

32. “There is no justice we don’t make daily like bread and love.”

— Marge Piercy

33. “Whatever is not an energy source, is an energy sink.”

— Marge Piercy

34. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

35. “One trouble: to be a professional anything in the United States is to think of oneself as an expert and one’s ideas as semisacred, and to treat others in a certain way – professionally.”

— Marge Piercy

36. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

37. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

38. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

39. “History is a game played backwards only.”

— Marge Piercy

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

— Marge Piercy

41. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

42. “The real writer is one who really writes.”

— Marge Piercy

43. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

44. “I think we validate our lives through our actions.”

— Marge Piercy

45. “The sense of being Jewish never left me, but when my grandmother died, I rebelled against Judaism as I knew it then, which was Orthodox. I saw the rituals, a lot of them, as very male, for a long time.”

— Marge Piercy

46. “On this twelfth day of my diet I would rather die satiated than slim.”

— Marge Piercy

47. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

48. “I am a driven writer. I feel guilty if I don’t write, not self-indulgent if I do.”

— Marge Piercy

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

— Marge Piercy

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

— Marge Piercy