Literary Birthday – 31 March – Marge Piercy

Happy Birthday, Marge Piercy, born 31 March 1936.

12 Quotes

1. Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.
2. Writing sometimes feels frivolous and sometimes sacred, but memory is one of my strongest muses. I serve her with my words.
3. Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream.
4. 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.
5. A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done.
6. If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening.
7. 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.
8. We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.
9. Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment.
10. Hope sleeps in our bones like a bear waiting for spring to rise and walk.
11. 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?
12. Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen.

Marge Piercy is an American poet, novelist, and social activist. Her work includes Woman on the Edge of Time; He, She and It, which won the 1993 Arthur C. Clarke Award; and Gone to Soldiers.

 by Amanda Patterson

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