Quotes from Woman on the Edge of Time

Marge Piercy ·  376 pages

Rating: (11.5K votes)


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


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


About the author

Marge Piercy
Born place: in Detroit, Michigan, The United States
Born date March 31, 1936
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“Even when I cried,” she said, a world of resignation in her tone, “I was glad to be here with you, Westhaven. Believe that, if you believe nothing else of me.”

What she had meant was: Even when I cried because I must leave you, I was glad to be here with you… Believe that if you believe nothing else of me when I find the courage to finally go.”
― Grace Burrowes, quote from The Heir


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― Lynda Barry, quote from Cruddy


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― John Scalzi, quote from The Android's Dream


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― Richard Wright, quote from The Outsider


“Must I accept the barren Gift?
-learn death, and lose my Mastery?
Then let them know whose blood and breath
will take the Gift and set them free:
whose is the voice and whose the mind
to set at naught the well-sung Game-
when finned Finality arrives
and calls me by my secret Name.

Not old enough to love as yet,
but old enough to die, indeed-
-the death-fear bites my throat and heart,
fanged cousin to the Pale One's breed.
But past the fear lies life for all-
perhaps for me: and, past my dread,
past loss of Mastery and life,
the Sea shall yet give up Her dead!

Lone Power, I accept your Gift!
Freely I make death a part of me;
By my accept it is bound
into the lives of all the Sea-

yet what I do now binds to it
a gift I feel of equal worth:
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and make of it a path, a birth!

Let the teeth come! As they tear me,
they tear Your ancient hate for aye-
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and see my blood teach Death to die!”
― Diane Duane, quote from Deep Wizardry


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