197 Quotes by Marge Piercy

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

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.

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.

I find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people.

Baby, tonight you're the reason I have lips.

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

The societies kids naturally form are tribal. Gangs, clubs, packs. But we're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb.

they were in love with apocalypse, like all men, more in love with myths than with any woman.

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.