Marge Piercy
Sleeping together is a euphemism for people, but tantamount to marriage with cats.Collection: Marriage
Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.Collection: History
A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done.Collection: Strength
Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.
The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.
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.
Shared laughter is erotic too.
Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.
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.
My strength and my weakness are twins in the same womb.
Love as if you liked yourself, and it may happen.
If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening.
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.
We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.Collection: Inspiring
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.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Glasses
The best gift you can give is a hug: one size fits all and no one ever minds if you return it.Collection: Friendship
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?Collection: Lying
The powerful don't make revolutionsCollection: Powerful
Hope sleeps in our bones like a bear waiting for spring to rise and walk.Collection: Spring
Whatever is not an energy source, is an energy sink.Collection: Energy
Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen.Collection: Life
The people I love the best, jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows.Collection: Women
There is no justice we don't make daily like bread and love.Collection: Justice
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Stuff
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.Collection: Strong Women
It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.Collection: Love
Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out.Collection: Doorways
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.Collection: Sexy
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.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Mother
I think we validate our lives through our actions.Collection: Thinking
If sex is a war, I am a conscientious objector: I will not play.Collection: Sex
Our wedding plans please everybody as if we were fertilizing the earth and creating social luck.Collection: Creating
the body is simple as a turtle / and straight as a dog: / the body cannot lie.Collection: Dog
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.Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Thinking
I am a driven writer. I feel guilty if I don't write, not self-indulgent if I do.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Past
The moon is always female and so am I although often in the vale of razorblades I have wished I could put on and take off my sex like a dress and why not?Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Strength
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.Collection: Baby
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.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Blood
Too much self-regard has never struck me as dignified: trying to twist over my shoulder to view my own behind.Collection: Self
Art is a game only if you playat it, a mirror that reflects from the inside out.Collection: Art