Marge Piercy

"I never wanted to belong to anybody. I only wanted to borrow them for a while, for the fun of it, the tenderness, some laughs." (Malkah, nine: REVISING THE FAMILY ALBUM)

"Before you, the strongest feeling I knew was fear." (Yod, twenty-two: THE PRESENT)

They ambled around the world through the Glops, into multi enclaves, onto the tubes and the zips, far more freely and safely than people or animals could. Shira watched it wistfully. That was true freedom, she thought, something now available only to special machines. (fourteen: BY THE LIGHT OF THE UNYELLOW MOON)

"Nobody at twenty-eight is a success or a failure. It's too early to figure out which way the tide's moving (Malkah, fifteen: THE SAME AS ME)

This was the home she had fled, not from an unhappy childhood but from too early and too intense love, paradise torn. (four: THROUGH THE BURNING LABYRINTH)

Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream. (p67)

"I still have insomnia, but now I tell myself stories instead of counting men." (Malkah nine: REVISING THE FAMILY ALBUM)

Malkah's love was strong but abrasive, scrubbing her clean. Gadi's love bore both roses and thorns... (five: FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE: THE DAY OF ALEF)

"...No one can stop children in love unless by exile. But you'll never grow up if you don't let go of each other." (Malkah, six: WE KNOW TOO MUCH AND TOO LITTLE)

No one before the twenty-first century had ever loved flowers and fruiting trees and little birds and the simple beauty of green leaves as did those who lived after the Famine, for whom they were precious and rare and always endangered. (four: THROUGH THE BURNING LABYRINTH)

"Some people go on wanting [sex] as long as they live, but other people, they let it go as if it were a garment that had worn out." (Malkah, nine: REVISING THE FAMILY ALBUM)

"I used to wonder what I did wrong. But now I think that unless you grossly mistreat a child or spoil her or let her be injured, basically there's a given element in all of us, something from genes or the moment. From birth on, a child follows her own path. She learns, but she also unfolds from within." (Malkah, twenty-eight: HOW CAN WE TELL THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE?)