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Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy Books

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Braided Lives

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He, She and It

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Vida

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“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.”

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Book:Dance the Eagle to Sleep
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“The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls. I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again. 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. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.”

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Book:Circles on the Water: Selected Poems
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“All day you have been on my mind A seagull perched on an old wharf piling by the steely grip of its claws shrieking when any other comes too near waiting for fish or what the tide brings shaking out its long white wings like laundry. All day you have been on my mind a thrift store glamour hat that doesn't fit with a perky veil scratching my cheek with a feather hanging down like a broken tail.”

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Book:The Moon Is Always Female: Poems
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“every time a bomb exploded, every anti-personnel weapon that sent its hundreds of particles tearing through the sift tissues of soft bodies, every helicopter that was shot down with its crew, every plane hit with a missile: brrrring, brrrring, on the great cash register in the homeland bank. It was all profit. It would have to be replaced. It was the perfect form of fantastically expensive and forced consumption, paid for by taxes.”

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Book:Dance the Eagle to Sleep
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“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.”

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Author:Marge Piercy
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“We admire predators - panthers, lions, tigers, even wolves. Maybe to be naturally thoughtful and hesitant to use violence is to be somehow second rate. To be in the middle of the social food chain. Especially if you're a man. This society thinks real men are violent.”

IfsThinkingMenRealUseSocialViolenceMiddleRateViolentAdmireChainsThoughtfulLionsTigersPredatorReal MenThis SocietySecond RateFood ChainHesitantPanthers
Book:The Longings of Women: A Novel
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“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.”

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Book:Braided Lives: A Novel
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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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Author:Marge Piercy
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