Dance the Eagle to Sleep Quotes

“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.”
― Marge Piercy, Dance the Eagle to Sleep

“People were not getting back what they wanted for their sold labor. Taxes grew and services shrank. Prices rose and quality decayed. Everywhere people felt used and betrayed and coerced and cheated.”
― Marge Piercy, Dance the Eagle to Sleep

“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.”
― Marge Piercy, Dance the Eagle to Sleep

“Drifting with things is a habit it takes almost dying to break.”
― Marge Piercy, Dance the Eagle to Sleep

“It's the last great free-for-all robbery of everybody's earth.”
― Marge Piercy, Dance the Eagle to Sleep

“they were in love with apocalypse, like all men, more in love with myths than with any woman.”
― Marge Piercy, Dance the Eagle to Sleep

“They found the library sadly lacking in texts they could use.”
― Marge Piercy, Dance the Eagle to Sleep

“Whenever the balance of power was unequal, there was a driver and a driven. Power was the lethal vice, the turn-on with evil built into it, because it required a victim to manifest itself. Power implied subject and object. They needed some way to recognize (for everyone to recognize) that everybody was a subject.”
― Marge Piercy, Dance the Eagle to Sleep

“Los Angeles: city that was nothing but a slot machine dispensing plastic toys.”
― Marge Piercy, Dance the Eagle to Sleep

“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, Dance the Eagle to Sleep

“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, Dance the Eagle to Sleep