Marge Piercy

"I said, I like my life. If I have to give it back, if they take it from me, let me only not feel I wasted any, let me not feel I forgot to love anyone I meant to love, that I forgot to give what I held in my hands, that I forgot to do some little piece of the work that wanted to come through."

"The noise from outside broke loud and sudden, as if somebody had begun cutting a superhighway through the woods. Dinah's first reaction was fury. Bounding up, she spilled her coffee right into the lap of the black velvet robe Susan had made for her. A chain saw screeched nasally but she heard something growlier under it."

"We are past the point where critics, whether reviewing a few poetry books in the London Times or New York Times, or for literary magazines, editors, teachers of literature and male poets themselves can pontificate about poetry and mean only the work of twenty or thirty white male writers."

"Good work in a field breeds interest and makes room for more good practitioners. We are not rivals but workers building something whose final shape we are not able even to fantasize."

"Like species, couples die out or evolve."

"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?"

"Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen: reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in."

"Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out."

"No, thanks." Vida placed her hand over the top of the tulip-shaped wineglass. "No more for me. Thank you." "This is a good Vouvray. Louis in the wine store recommended it" Hank tried to nudge her hand aside with the cold dripping base of the bottle. "It's lovely. I've just had enough." She made herself smile. It felt like a date, a bad date. She had to keep smiling across the debris of the dinner for two. "The chicken was wonderful!"

"Drifting with things is a habit it takes almost dying to break."

"Beth was looking in the mirror of her mother's vanity. The mirror had wings that opened and shut. When she was little she used to like to pull them together around her into a cave of mirrors with only a slit of light. It isn't me, isn't me. Well, who else would it be, stupid? Isn't anyone except Bride: a dress wearing a girl."

"The point of creating futures is to get people to imagine what they want and don’t want to happen down the road – and maybe do something about it."

"Feminist utopias were created out of a hunger for what we didn’t have, at a time when change felt not only possible but probable. Utopias came from the desire to imagine a better society when we dared to do so."

"When I was a child, I first noticed that neither history as I was taught it, nor the stories I was told, seemed to lead to me. I began to fix them. I have been at it ever since. We need a past that leads to us. Similarly, what we imagine we are working toward does a lot to define what we will consider doable action aimed at producing the future we want and preventing the future we fear."

"Utopia is born of the hunger for something better, but it relies on hope as the engine for imagining such a future. I wanted to take what I considered the most fruitful ideas of the various movements for social change and make them vivid and concrete – that was the real genesis of Woman on the Edge of Time."

"It may be that television and the ever more aggressive investigative efforts of the news media have addled our ability to choose a leader wisely. Between sound bites and the seduction of images, we run a popularity contest every four years instead of an election. ("THE MORE WE SEE, THE LESS WE KNOW" , article originally from 2004)"

"The worst thing that a politician can be called is elitist-and what do we mean by that? In Iowa, Howard Dean was labeled that-a sushi eating, PBS watching, Volvo driving man-not macho enough, clearly, to win the vote of working men. But who determines the massive layoffs and the movement of corporations abroad that gut the economies of so many cities and drive families from comfort into chaos? Those are the members of the real elite ("THE MORE WE SEE, THE LESS WE KNOW")"

"Poetry was a way of keeping myself relatively sane and trying to make sense of the world I inhabited, which did not correspond to the world shown on the television we acquired the year we moved or the world that textbooks and school commended to us. The place I had grown up in was far more violent. Radical politics made sense to me. ("TOUCHED BY GINSBERG AT A (RELATIVELY) TENDER AGE")"

"Poetry changes with every generation, but it does not improve or progress. It just changes its styles, trappings and some of its obsessions, but we can still enjoy Sappho and Homer; they are today's news as much as when they were written or recited."

"the most fruitful ways to approach the future for me are speculative fiction or utopian fiction. Isaac Asimov once said that all science fiction falls into three categories: What if, If only, and If this continues. I have written in all three categories."

"Who wants equality? Those who do not have it."

"(about putting time into trying to look young) It is certainly a replacement for educating your mind, developing your interests, becoming closer to other people. If you spent the amount of time a week you might spend on the pursuit of a prepubescent body on learning a foreign language, on writing something meaningful to yourself and to others, on practicing piano, on changing the society-this country would be a far different place."

"Utopia is work that issues from pain: it is what we do not have that we crave."

"It is by imagining what we truly desire that we begin to go there. That is the kind of thinking about the future that seems to me most fruitful, most rewarding. I want a future in which women are not punished for having women's bodies, are not punished for desire or the lack of it, are viewed as independent protagonists in their own adventures-spiritual, intellectual, romantic, sexual, and creative adventures. That's one reason I read and write speculative fiction."

"When the knocking came, Maud was taking a sponge bath. (first line of "The Cost of Lunch, Etc.")"

"In my life, there have been a great many Mr. Wrongs. I married one of them and spent time and energy and emotion on dozens more. My feeling is that in love you are entitled to a great many mistakes so long as you aren't making the same one over and over. (beginning of "The Easy Arrangement")"

"As if a wind that had been blowing hard against her had suddenly fallen silent, her ears roared with silence. ("What the Arbor Said")"

"I love silence but I fear emptiness. (p11)"

"From the time I arrived on the Cape, one of the things I chose explicitly was to put my writing first. Everything else in my life waxed and waned, but writing, I discovered during my restructuring, was my real core. (p218)"

"At that time, a pregnant woman could not get an abortion in Massachusetts -- but a cat could. (p221)"

"Attention is love, what we must give children, mothers, fathers, pets, our friends, the news, the woes of others. What we want to change we curse and then pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can with eyes and hands and tongue. If you can't bless it, get ready to make it new."

"Holy is the hand that works for peace and for justice, holy is the mouth that speaks for goodness, holy is the foot that walks toward mercy."

"there is no justice we don't make daily like bread and love."

"Poems start from a phrase, an image, an idea, a rhythm insistent in the back of the brain...Some poems are a journey of discovery and exploration for the writer as well as the reader. I find out where I am going when I finally arrive, which may take years."

"The mind wraps itself around a poem."

"Each good novel has a vision of its world that informs what is put in and what is left out."

"For me the gifts of the novelist are empathy and imagination."

"I think poetry ultimately is a more communal activity than fiction, but I love both equally."

"Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream. (p67)"

"He fought her with full energy and intelligence, as she had wanted to be loved. (one: IN THE CORPORATE FORTRESS)"

"He's in Veecee Beecee, making those elaborate worlds people play at living in instead of worrying about the one we're all stuck with." (one: IN THE CORPORATE FORTRESS)"

"No one before the twenty-first century had ever loved flowers and fruiting trees and little birds and the simple beauty of green leaves as did those who lived after the Famine, for whom they were precious and rare and always endangered. (four: THROUGH THE BURNING LABYRINTH)"

"This was the home she had fled, not from an unhappy childhood but from too early and too intense love, paradise torn. (four: THROUGH THE BURNING LABYRINTH)"

"For years she had had this magic circle they could weave about themselves, luminous with Gadi's imagination, the place where she could never be lonely or bored. In that private world of play more intense, far more real than reality, she was whatever she longed for. (five: FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE: THE DAY OF ALEF)"

"Malkah's love was strong but abrasive, scrubbing her clean. Gadi's love bore both roses and thorns... (five: FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE: THE DAY OF ALEF)"

"His body was a city, vast, filling her head. (five: FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE: THE DAY OF ALEF)"

""You love too hard. It occupies the center and squeezes out your strength. If you work in the center and love to the side, you will love better in the long run, Shira. You will give more gracefully, without counting, and what you get, you will enjoy." (Malkah, six: WE KNOW TOO MUCH AND TOO LITTLE)"

""...No one can stop children in love unless by exile. But you'll never grow up if you don't let go of each other." (Malkah, six: WE KNOW TOO MUCH AND TOO LITTLE)"

"She felt as if she were seventeen again, ignorant, fearful, a creature all gusty emotions and pain. (eight: HOW SHALL I ADDRESS YOU?)"

"I would like it if those who were active at the time I am writing about find in Vida something that brings back the excitement, the fear, the hope of that era. I would be pleased if those too young to have lived through those times might find something of value in our struggles, might learn from our successes and our failures and be inspired to imagine a movement that might again try to change the structure and direction of our country into a more humane, just and equal society."