Life & Wisdom Quote by Marge Piercy

Piercy turns hope into something muscular, not sentimental: it "sleeps in our bones", an image that refuses the tidy idea of optimism as a mood you can summon on command. Bones are structure, the stubborn architecture that holds you up when everything else is soft or broken. By lodging hope there, she suggests endurance at the level of anatomy - a survival instinct that outlasts despair, politics, even language.

The bear metaphor does double work. Hibernation is not surrender; it's strategy. The bear doesn't pray winter away, it conserves heat, lowers its pulse, waits with ancient competence. That makes the line quietly radical: it reframes passivity as preparation. Hope, in Piercy's universe, isn't the bright poster on the wall; it's the dark-room metabolism that keeps you alive long enough to act.

There's also a latent warning. A bear "waiting for spring" is not tame. When it rises and walks, it has heft, hunger, consequence. Piercy implies that suppressed hope can return as force - collective, bodily, maybe even dangerous to the systems that prefer people exhausted and compliant. Given her career-long attention to feminism, labor, and resistance, the context hums beneath the metaphor: movements go dormant, people go numb, but the capacity to rise doesn't disappear. It settles into the bones, storing itself like fuel, until conditions shift and the body remembers what it was built to do.