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Marge Piercy

127 quotes

“I've been amazed at the number of unions that tell me how helpful "To be of use" is to them in their organizing work.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am an intensely curious person, nosy, insatiable. As a poet, everything you experience, whether personally or vicariously or virtuously or virtually, for that matter, is your stuff. Imagery can't really be taught. You can lecture about the different kinds of imagery in different sorts of poems, but the truth is, imagery is the most personal core of a poet. What you know and what you feel becomes your imagery.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You have to stay open and curious and keep learning as you go. Poems come from a whole variety of sources. When you're younger, you believe in inspiration. As you get older, you believe most in receptivity and work.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have been living in times in which human cruelty is all around us. Yet the world is very beautiful.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To be a poet is to open your eyes to everything around you. I love the beauty of the world, but I get angry at the cruelty in the world. How can we not get angry at the tremendous cruelty that is built into our system?”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“From the third grade on, women are trained to mistrust their natural bodies and to try to make them conform with body types belonging to two percent of the population.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lots of people are angry and just can't figure out where to aim their anger. We forget how to do anything political. Every generation has to start all over again-people have to figure out what's happened, but you have to start with two, three at a time, and organize. In the meantime, we need the poems-if not for the politicians then for the people the politicians ignore.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I want my poems to give voice to something in the experience of a life. To find ourselves spoken for in art gives dignity to our pain, our anger, our losses.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The farther you are from the centers of power in this society, the less likely you are to find validation of your experiences, your insights and ideas, your life. It is more important to you to find in art that validation, that respect for your experiences that no minority except the thin, white, and wealthy can count on.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Poems told me there were other people who felt the way I felt. That was validation for the person I was. Poems can mean survival.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you're female in this society, culture tells you that you've had it if you're not twenty-two, blond, and weigh about ninety-two pounds. Then, even if you are twenty-two, blond, and weigh ninety-two pounds, you're still going to fail because you're going to get old. Women are destined to age into failure even if when they're young they are what society defines as perfect. Poems about women who are not twenty-two, blond, and ninety-two pounds can remind us of reality.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have to know how connected we are. It's quite remarkable, the very strange notion of the self today. We think the self stops right here. But my self doesn't stop here. It flows out into the people I love, into the people I have loved, the people I come from, the people I speak to. Sometimes, in dream or in vision, we encounter each other without boundaries. Being strong means being strong together.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I like sex because it's one of the ways that people leave off operating so much with forebrain. If I like poetry because it ties all the different ways of knowing and being together, sex does the same thing.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The reason I am political is because I want there to be a juster apportionment of the world's pleasure and less unjust apportionment of the world's pain. Power per se is fairly uninteresting to me, except as I observe it distorting peoples' characters.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that there is in any of us numerous other people that we never live out, and our opposites are as fascinating as what we are. In fiction you get to live out all those little pieces of you, that never really come into your life at all.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't tend to smile a lot in situations where I feel on display - public situations. I speak directly and straightforwardly and bluntly, and that lack of subterfuge and lack of middle-class women's mannerisms is perceived by some men as hostile, just as Black behavior which is simply straightforward is perceived by some whites as hostile.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Unlike some separatists I don't view men as biologically impaired. I believe sexism is culturally conditioned and that if you change the culture, you will change the kind of behavior which people with the various sorts of genitalia will consider appropriate. What I hate in men is what I consider ugly, brutal, violent, mean behavior - behavior damaging to women, to men they consider inferior, to children, to other living creatures with whom we share our biosphere.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm a pluralist in sexuality as in most things. I want people to make many different choices and flourish in them, and to respect the choices they don't make in their own lives as well as those they do.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am very interested in the voluntary families that people create; not just the communes but the informal social webs by which a great many people survive and flourish. A lot of my adult life I have been trying in one form or another to create alternatives to the nuclear family.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Friendship is my paradigm for the good relationship. If you like someone, you will also love them better. If you love without liking, there's a chill at the core of it that easily turns into possessiveness, jealousy, competition.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is honor from a woman's point of view? Honor has been defined from a male point of view. What does it mean to choose not to endure having been raped?”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“just as politically when there is no vocabulary for discussing your situation, when you're a woman before there is language of feminism, trying to understand what it's like to be a woman, you have no concepts, no vocabulary for even understanding your own situation.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Often I imagine in different and better times not have to be political. I can even imagine, when I am at the bottom of a long uphill grade, doing something besides writing novels, although I doubt it. But I never imagine living without poetry.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like many women, Daria both loved her mother and prayed not to become her. Often Daria felt helpless before her mother Nina's woes, yet her first impulse was to reassure herself: I am different. I have a good and faithful husband, I have my own work, I live in a beautiful house, I like my life. Misery was not hereditary or contagious. Since the plane had taken off late from Chicago, Daria had been dividing her time between worrying about her younger daughter Tracy, who had gone away to college for the first time, and Nina, who had sounded more depressed and lonely than usual on the phone last night. Was Nina really sick? Or just unhappy?”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: first lines of Fly Away Home (1984)
“Certain of any oppressed group can always rise from that group by incorporating the manners and value system of the oppressed, and outwitting them at their own rigged game. We want Something Else. We are told that our sense of oppression is not legitimate. We are told women's liberation is a secondary issue, to be dealt with after the war is won. But the basis of women's oppression is economic in a sense that far predates capitalism and the market economy and that is woven through the whole fabric of socialization. Our claims are the most radical, for they entail restructuring even the nuclear family. Nowhere on earth are women free now, although in some places things are marginally better. What we want we will have to invent ourselves.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(What advice would you give to young people who are currently concerned about the state of the world and who want to fight against environmental destruction and big business?) There are endless organizations that have sprung up since Trump entered office to fight many of his terrible decisions and appointments.There are also environmental organizations that have been around since the seventies. Join a group that appeals to you and work on the issue that most alarms or impinges on you. No one else can tell you what to join or what to work on. It has to be something that actually gets you excited, angry, and passionate, not something you think you should care about.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea that poetry should be devoid of politics is a modern heresy designed to diminish any slight power we might have, to render us irrelevant. It is a notion that poets before about 1940 would have found really weird. Shakespeare's plays are rife with politics; same with Milton, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley, [[Byron, and that's only a few British poets. All the Irish poets had political ideas. Go back to the Romans. Find one without politics! Poets and novelists and memoirists and essayists are all citizens like your plumber or neighborhood cop or clergy. If you don't take an interest, politics may come down on your head, may take away your livelihood, pollute your air, give you cancer from the food you eat, teach your children garbage and false history, make you pay for wars you don't believe in and actually hate.”
Marge Piercy (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source