Sleeping together is a euphemism for people, but tantamount to marriage with cats.

— Marge Piercy

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.

— Marge Piercy

The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.

— Marge Piercy

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like florist after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

— Marge Piercy

The societies kid 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.

— Marge Piercy

The will to be totally rational is the will to be made out of glass and steel: and to use others as if they were glass and steel.

— Marge Piercy

They found the library sadly lacking in texts they could use.

— Marge Piercy

They were in love with apocalypse, like all men, more in love with myths than with any woman.

— Marge Piercy

Thinking about tracking. . . . Sometime in grade school, already your fate was settled, your social class was established for the rest of your life.

— Marge Piercy

To Have Without Holding:Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, love with the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the wind roaring and whimpering in the rooms rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds that thwack like rubber band sin an open palm. It hurts to love wide open stretching the muscles that feels if they are made of wet plaster, then of blunt knives, then of sharp knives. It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch, to love and Lego again and again. Furthermore, it pesters to remember the lover who is not in the bed, to hold back what is owed to the work that gutters like a candle in a cave without air, to love consciously, conscientiously, concretely, constructively. I can't do it, you say it's killing me, but you thrive, you glow on the street like a neon raspberry, You float and sail, a helium balloon bright bachelor's buttons blue and bobbing on the cold and hot winds of our breath, as we make and unmake in passionate diastole and systole the rhythm of our unbound bonding, to have and not to hold, to love with minimized malice, hunger and anger moment by moment balanced.

— Marge Piercy