Gone to Soldiers Quotes

“Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding, the third”
― Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers

“Nobody hates us as ourselves. In their minds we're not human... They don't hate us because we did something or said something. They make us stand for an evil they invent and then they want to kill it in us.”
― Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers

“Shall I tell you something I've been noticing? The mistrust this society has for women. All kinds of experts and officials are terrified because so many women are working. They really think that women have to be coerced into having babies and raising kids.”
― Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers

“Her life seemed to her a great engineering work scarcely begun. Lately more excavation than construction had occurred. She had lost a sense of her own invincibility. In that way she was no longer archetypically American.”
― Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers

“His family disapproved of his infatuation with things Chinese. His father, his mother and his sister Judy had lived in China like a family of cats standing on a log in a brook, keeping dry, keeping out of the world flowing past.”
― Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers

“Huddled in her mink in the Kansas City airport, she had a vision of women writing about sex as openly as male writers, but quite, quite differently. Some women would treat sex much as men did,as conquest, as adventure--in a way as McCarthy had. Other women would treat female sexuality far less romantically then men who did not consider themselves romantics, like Hemingway, were wont to. The earth would not move, no, there would be more biology and less theatrics. Women had less ego involvement in sex than men did, but far more at stake economically.”
― Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers

“No, It's not fair. But I was thinking more along the lines of the Pentagon and Washington itself. Sometimes I suspect that those who are running things might grow addicted to power. Secrecy's essential in wartime, but once in place, will it ever be removed?”
― Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers

“Finally something besides infatuation had focused him. He was no longer merely flowing water.”
― Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers

“Since 1939 he had lived expecting war any moment. The Nazis were far more real to him than to most Americans he met, and far more frightening. He did not share the mirth of his acquaintances at Hitler the ex-paperhanger who made funny faces and ridiculous speeches as his legions goose-stepped and fell on their faces. He had seen them in the streets of Heidelberg and Berlin and Frankfurt. They were drunk with violence and power.”
― Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers

“It seems to be a custom when women of the Resistance are escorting escapees and downed fliers, to pretend to be lovers with them, but this has never been my habit. I believe that acting as lovers in public actually draws people’s attention and they look at you more carefully than they might otherwise. The women look at the man to see whether they find him attractive and at the woman to judge what he sees in her. Whereas if you act as if you are a bored and sullen couple with little to say, nobody pays attention. That is my theory.”
― Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers

“could give them, not the dutiful, selfish and perfunctory love of an adolescent, but an understanding love that would lighten”
― Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers

“Even Churchill, who will support any peabrained drooling dinosaur bitch who calls herself the King of Transylvania, understands that Tito is fighting the Germans and our man Mihajlović mainly fighting Tito. I’ve been with both parties, jaunting about the mountains of that misbegotten country where everybody speaks his own language. My dear, I’m something of a linguist, but a country the size of Pennsylvania with five different languages? It reduced your poor battered lover to pointing and grimacing like the duchess who sat on an anthill.”
― Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers

“Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.”
― Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers

“Daniel felt a controlled importance, a fine passionate honing of his attention and intellect that made him impatient with his whole previous life.”
― Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers

“He had fallen in love with landscape painting because of that element of chance and grace. He would go out to a field, to a beach, to a hill, and set himself up. As he focused on the scene before him, around him, the scene he was part of and became rooted in, it came more and more intensely alive until every leaf and every fly glinting in the sun and every dust mote demanded his attention. He felt totally open then, connected, vulnerable, better than love and more honest. In order to paint well he had to abandon control. Everything constantly changed before him and everything moved and he stood in a swirl of chaos and humbly addressed it. Whatever he put on canvas was insufficient, as love is insufficient. If he was clear, if he was open, if he was vulnerable and strong enough in his seeing, then he would grasp some spirit present and it would animate what he painted, although his first reaction was always to hate what he had done, because it failed the vast changing thingness he had astonishingly and passionately witnessed. Studio painters could dream of control, but landscape painters knew how they stood before the gods of the place, tiny, hopeful, diddling away. All he could ever paint was a tiny flash of what truly showed itself to him, a seizure on one moment.”
― Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers

“she had ordered a turkey from the Garfinkles, who raised them.”
― Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers

“He will make any woman happy a little while and then unhappy a long while.”
― Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers

“True goodness is like water. Water helps the ten thousand things without itself striving. Water flows down into the low places men despise, for water is in the Way,”
― Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers