Woman on the Edge of Time Quotes

“We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

“The anger of the weak never goes away, Professor, it just gets a little moldy. It molds like a beautiful blue cheese in the dark, growing stronger, and more interesting. The poor and the weak die with all their anger intact and probably those angers go on growing in the dark of the grave like the hair and the nails.”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

“The powerful don’t make revolutions”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

“Hate them more than you hate yourself, and you’ll stay free!”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

“The point of creating futures is to get people to imagine what they want and don’t want to happen down the road – and maybe do something about it.”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

“Only in us do the dead live. Water flows downhill through us. The sun cools in our bones. We are joined with all living in one singing web of energy. In us live the dead who made us. In us live the children unborn. Breathing each other’s air, drinking each other’s water, eating each other’s flesh, we grow like a tree from the earth.”
― Marge Piercy, Woman On The Edge Of Time

“Never in your life have you been helpless—under somebody’s heel. You never lived where your enemies held power over you, power to run your life or wipe it out. You can’t understand. That’s how come you stand there feeding me empty slogans!” Luciente bowed her head. “You crit me justly, Connie. Forgive me. I’ll try to see your situation more clearly and make less loud noises in your ears.”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

“When I was a child, I first noticed that neither history as I was taught it nor the stories I was told seemed to lead to me. I began to fix them.”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

“I want to do something very important. Like fly into the past and make it come out right.”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

“Suddenly she thought that these men believed feeling itself a disease, something to be cut out like a rotten appendix. Cold, calculating, ambitious, believing themselves rational and superior, they chased the crouching female animal through the brain with a scalpel. From an early age she had been told that what she felt was unreal and didn’t matter. Now they were about to place in her something that would rule her feelings like a thermostat”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

“Whoever owned this place, these cities, whoever owned those glittering glassy office buildings in midtown filled with the purr of money turning over, those refineries over the river in Jersey with their flames licking the air, they gave nothing back. They took and took and left their garbage choking the air, the river, the sea itself. Choking her. A life of garbage. Human garbage. She had had too little of what her body needed and too little of what her soul could imagine. She had been able to do little in the years of her life, and that little had been ill paid or punished. The rest was garbage.”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

“But I think we often settle for sex when we want love. And we often want love when we need something else, like a good job or a chance to go back to school.”
― Marge Piercy, Woman On The Edge Of Time

“Is nothing thrown away in your time?”
“Thrown away where? The world is round.”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

“But you say you respect difference."
"Different strengths we respect. Not weakness. What is the use in not actively engaging life? It passes anyhow.

She thought of the asylum. "Sometimes you have no choice.”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

“Every day was a lesson in how starved the eyes could grow for hue, for reds and golds; how starved the ears could grow for conga drums, for the blare of traffic, for dogs barking, for the baseball games chattering from TVs, for foices talking flatly, conversationally, with rising excitement in Spanish, for children playing n the streets, the Puerto Rican children whose voices sounded faster, harder, than Chicano Spanish, as if there were more metal in their throats.”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

“The powerful don’t make revolutions,”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time: The classic feminist dystopian novel

“it seems as if people fought hardest against those who had a little more than themselves or often a little less, instead of the lugs who got richer and richer.”
― Marge Piercy, Woman On The Edge Of Time

“Those of your time who fought hard for change, often they had myths that a revolution was inevitable. But nothing is! All things interlock. We are only one possible future”
― Marge Piercy, Woman On The Edge Of Time

“She felt pride and shame wash through her. Mala, the woman who acted. To thrust herself forward into the world.”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

“If person didn’t want to mother and you were a baby, you might not be loved enough to grow up loving and strong. Person must not do what person cannot do.”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

“But Connie, some problems you solve only if you stop being human, become metal, plastic, robot computer. Is dying itself a problem?”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

“Whoever owned this place, these cities, whoever owned those glittering glassy office buildings in midtown filled with the purr of money turning over, those refineries over the river in Jersey with their flames licking the air, they gave nothing back. They took and took and left their garbage choking the air, the river, the sea itself. Choking her. A life of garbage. Human garbage. She had had too little of what her body needed and too little of what her soul could imagine. She had been able to do little in the years of her life, and that little had been ill paid or punished. The rest was garbage.

Who could ever pay for the pain of bringing a child into dirt and pain? Never enough. Nothing you wanted to give her you ever could give her, including yourself, what you wanted to be with her and for her. Nothing you wanted for her could come true. Who could ever pay for the pain of rising day after day year after year in a dim room dancing with cockroaches, and looking out on a street like a sewer of slow death? All her life it felt to her she had been dying a cell at a time, a cell of hope, of joy, of love, little lights going out one by one. When her body had turned all to pain, would she die? Die and poison the earth like a plague victim, like so many pounds of lead?”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time