Top 100 Marge Piercy Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I’m probably the only novelist who has ever written about political fugitives who actually knew a lot about them, had contact with them, and had a realistic notion of how they survived.”

— Marge Piercy

52. “We lie in each other’s arms eyes shut and fingers open and all the colors of the world pass through our bodies like strings of fire.”

— Marge Piercy

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

— Marge Piercy

54. “The work of the world is common as mud.”

— Marge Piercy

55. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

56. “Love says, mine. Love says, I could eat you up. Love says, stay as you are, be my own private thing, don’t you dare have ideas I don’t share. Love has just got to gobble the other, bones and all, crunch. I don’t want to do that. I sure don’t want it done to me!”

— Marge Piercy

57. “The price of seeing is silence.”

— Marge Piercy

58. “Purple as tulips in May, mauve into lush velvet, purple as the stain blackberries leave on the lips, on the hands, the purple of ripe grapes sunlit and warm as flesh...”

— Marge Piercy

59. “The powerful don’t make revolutions.”

— Marge Piercy

60. “Only in us do the dead live. Water flows downhill through us. The sun cools in our bones. We are joined with all living in one singing web of energy. In us live the dead who made us. In us live the children unborn. Breathing each other’s air, drinking each other’s water, eating each other’s flesh, we grow like a tree from the earth.”

— Marge Piercy

61. “When I work I am pure as an angel tiger and clear is my eye and hot my brain and silent all the whining grunting piglets of the appetites.”

— Marge Piercy

62. “Remember that every son had a mother whose beloved son he was, and every woman had a mother whose beloved son she wasn’t.”

— Marge Piercy

63. “What a richly colored strong warm coat is woven when love is the warp and work is the woof.”

— Marge Piercy

64. “Troubles cured you salty as a country ham, smoky to the taste, thick-skinned and tender inside.”

— Marge Piercy

65. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

66. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

67. “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

68. “My idea of Hell is to be young again.”

— Marge Piercy

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

— Marge Piercy

70. “I wrote to make sense out of all the contradictions I experienced and to deal with the pain and loss I was undergoing.”

— Marge Piercy

71. “Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen.”

— Marge Piercy

72. “Everything you study, everything you learn, makes you a better writer, because you have more understanding of how things work.”

— Marge Piercy

73. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

74. “I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again.”

— Marge Piercy

75. “The mind wraps itself around a poem. It is almost sensual, particularly if you work on a computer. You can turn the poem round and about and upside down, dancing with it a kind of bolero of two snakes twisting and coiling, until the poem has found its right and proper shape.”

— Marge Piercy

76. “The ruling class isn’t dissatisfied: they are healthy, well-fed, live in beauty, enjoy their own importance: fun-loving cannibals.”

— Marge Piercy

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

— Marge Piercy

78. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

79. “Never let them know who you really are, how you live, and that you can observe and think, that was her motto.”

— Marge Piercy

80. “When I was a child, I first noticed that neither history as I was taught it nor the stories I was told seemed to lead to me. I began to fix them.”

— Marge Piercy

81. “Those of your time who fought hard for change, often they had myths that a revolution was inevitable. But nothing is! All things interlock. We are only one possible future.”

— Marge Piercy

82. “The point of creating futures is to get people to imagine what they want and don’t want to happen down the road – and maybe do something about it.”

— Marge Piercy

83. “Suspense is one of the ways you persuade a reader to become engaged and stay engaged with your work.”

— Marge Piercy

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

— Marge Piercy

85. “I don’t apologize for being sexually adventurous. Why not? It was often fun. When it wasn’t – I didn’t continue what wasn’t pleasant.”

— Marge Piercy

86. “Drifting with things is a habit it takes almost dying to break.”

— Marge Piercy

87. “Pain is a forcing sieve that turns me to gruel.”

— Marge Piercy

88. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

89. “Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment.”

— Marge Piercy

90. “Shared laughter is erotic too.”

— Marge Piercy

91. “I don’t even remember what Mother and I quarreled about: it is a continual quarrel that began when I reached puberty.”

— Marge Piercy

92. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

93. “Children always wanted their parents in situ, in stasis. The faster they changed, the more their parents should remain the same.”

— Marge Piercy

94. “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

95. “I think having a great range of experiences in my life had helped me as a writer, particularly a writer of fiction. I have known a great many different sorts of people in different situations, and I have a notion how very well of badly people can behave in times of stress or danger or violence.”

— Marge Piercy

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

— Marge Piercy

97. “Hate them more than you hate yourself, and you’ll stay free!”

— Marge Piercy

98. “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.”

— Marge Piercy

99. “She had been swimming in a big pink aquarium, and she never thought that somebody would come along with a hammer and break it until she was gasping for her life and everything she had taken for granted, for permanent, was gone.”

— Marge Piercy

100. “When she kissed him, he melted like a lump of milk chocolate.”

— Marge Piercy