Marge Piercy
Writer
1936-03-31
Books by Marge Piercy
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Prentice Hall Literature--Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes--Gold Level
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Quotes by Marge Piercy
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When will women not be compelledto view their bodies as science projects,gardens to be weeded, dogs to be trained?When will a woman ceaseto be made of pain?
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A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done
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Whenever the balance of power was unequal, there was a driver and a driven. Power was the lethal vice, the turn-on with evil built into it, because it required a victim to manifest itself. Power implied subject and object. They needed some way to recognize (for everyone to recognize) that everybody was a subject.
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they were in love with apocalypse, like all men, more in love with myths than with any woman.
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Drifting with things is a habit it takes almost dying to break.
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Where do dreams come from?...they slink out of books, they lurk in the stacks of libraries. Out of pages turned they rise like the scent of peonies and infect the brain with their promises.
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In fiction, I exercise my nosiness. I am as curious as my cats, and indeed that has led to trouble often enough and used up several of my nine lives. I am an avid listener. I am fascinated by other people's lives, the choices they make and how that works out through time, what they have done and left undone, what they tell me and what they keep secret and silent, what they lie about and what they confess, what they are proud of and what shames them, what they hope for and what they fear. The source of my fiction is the desire to understand people and their choices through time.
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I want to do something very important. Like fly into the past and make it come out right.
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thinking about tracking. . . . Sometime in grade school, already your fate was settled, your socialclass was established for the rest of your life.
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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.
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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.
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To Have Without Holding:Learning to love differently is hard,love with the hands wide open, lovewith the doors banging on their hinges,the cupboard unlocked, the windroaring and whimpering in the roomsrustling the sheets and snapping the blindsthat thwack like rubber bandsin an open palm.It hurts to love wide openstretching the muscles that feelas if they are made of wet plaster,then of blunt knives, thenof sharp knives.It hurts to thwart the reflexesof grab, of clutch, to love and letgo again and again. It pesters to rememberthe lover who is not in the bed,to hold back what is owed to the workthat gutters like a candle in a cavewithout air, to love consciously,conscientiously, concretely, constructively.I can't do it, you say it's killingme, but you thrive, you glowon the street like a neon raspberry,You float and sail, a helium balloonbright bachelor's buttons blue and bobbingon the cold and hot winds of our breath,as we make and unmake in passionatediastole and systole the rhythmof our unbound bonding, to haveand not to hold, to lovewith minimized malice, hungerand anger moment by moment balanced.
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thinking about tracking. . . . Sometime in grade school, already your fate was settled, your socialclass was established for the rest of your life.
Read quote -
When will women not be compelledto view their bodies as science projects,gardens to be weeded, dogs to be trained?When will a woman ceaseto be made of pain?
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
Drifting with things is a habit it takes almost dying to break.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
Whenever the balance of power was unequal, there was a driver and a driven. Power was the lethal vice, the turn-on with evil built into it, because it required a victim to manifest itself. Power implied subject and object. They needed some way to recognize (for everyone to recognize) that everybody was a subject.
Read quote -
To Have Without Holding:Learning to love differently is hard,love with the hands wide open, lovewith the doors banging on their hinges,the cupboard unlocked, the windroaring and whimpering in the roomsrustling the sheets and snapping the blindsthat thwack like rubber bandsin an open palm.It hurts to love wide openstretching the muscles that feelas if they are made of wet plaster,then of blunt knives, thenof sharp knives.It hurts to thwart the reflexesof grab, of clutch, to love and letgo again and again. It pesters to rememberthe lover who is not in the bed,to hold back what is owed to the workthat gutters like a candle in a cavewithout air, to love consciously,conscientiously, concretely, constructively.I can't do it, you say it's killingme, but you thrive, you glowon the street like a neon raspberry,You float and sail, a helium balloonbright bachelor's buttons blue and bobbingon the cold and hot winds of our breath,as we make and unmake in passionatediastole and systole the rhythmof our unbound bonding, to haveand not to hold, to lovewith minimized malice, hungerand anger moment by moment balanced.
Read quote -
I want to do something very important. Like fly into the past and make it come out right.
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