Listening is terribly important if you want to understand anything about people. You listen to what they say and how they say it, what they share and what they are reticent about, what they tell truthfully and what they lie about, what they hope for and what they fear, what they are proud of, what they are ashamed of. If you don't pay attention to other people, how can you understand their choices through time and how their stories come out?

Marge Piercy

Categorized in : People Lying Choices

Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.

Marge Piercy

empathy love life

We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.

Marge Piercy

dancing doorways inspiring

We must shine with hope, stained glass windows that shape light into icons, glow like lanterns borne before a procession. Who can bear hope back into the world but us.

Marge Piercy

icons glasses light

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.

Marge Piercy

choices mind giving

Praise our choices, sister, for each doorway open to us was taken by squads of fighting women who paid years of trouble and struggle, who paid their wombs, their sleep, their lives that we might walk through these gates upright. Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out. Freedom is our real abundance.

Marge Piercy

taken real struggle

A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done.

Marge Piercy

strong-women strength inspiring

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:

Marge Piercy

digging growth long

Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, love with the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the windroaring and whimpering in the rooms.

Marge Piercy

doors hands rooms

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.

Marge Piercy

dumb sex school

Every poet has a certain amount of "stuff." That's what you draw from for imagery. The more stuff you know well, not simply intellectually but sensually, emotionally, intimately, the wider the pool from which you draw.

Marge Piercy

pool poet stuff

Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen.

Marge Piercy

like-you may life

Hope sleeps in our bones like a bear waiting for spring to rise and walk.

Marge Piercy

waiting sleep spring

The best gift you can give is a hug: one size fits all and no one ever minds if you return it.

Marge Piercy

hug friendship giving

A strong woman is a woman who craves love like oxygen or she turns blue choking. A strong woman is a woman who loves strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong in words, in action, in connection, in feeling; she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

Marge Piercy

strong-women oxygen blue

It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.

Marge Piercy

love life sex

If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening.

Marge Piercy

empathy understanding time

Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment. All that remains of my mother is what I remember and what I have written for and about her. Eventually that is all that will remain of [my husband] and me. 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.

Marge Piercy

husband mother memories

Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.

Marge Piercy

change doubt history

I stayed under the moon too long.I am silvered with lust.Dreams flick like minnows through my eyes.My voice is trees tossing in the wind.I loose myself like a flock of blackbirdsstorming into your face.My lightest touch leaves blue prints,bruises on your mind.Desire sandpapers your skinso thin I read the veins and arteriesmaps of routes I will traveltill I lodge in your spine.The night is our fur.We curl inside it licking.

Marge Piercy

eye moon dream

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.

Marge Piercy

connections healing time