197 Quotes by Marge Piercy

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

I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out. The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

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.

Now that I am in my forties, she [my mother] tells me I'm beautiful; now that I am in my forties, she sends me presents and we have the long, personal and even remarkably honest phone calls I always wanted so intensely I forbade myself to imagine them. How strange. Perhaps Shaw was correct and if we lived to be several hundred years old, we would finally work it all out. I am deeply grateful. With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.

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

Pain is a forcing sieve that turns me to gruel.

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.

Too much self-regard has never struck me as dignified: trying to twist over my shoulder to view my own behind.

If sex is a war, I am a conscientious objector: I will not play.