Love Quote by Marge Piercy

Affection, in Marge Piercy's line, is a form of political and aesthetic preference: she loves the people who don’t flirt with effort, they commit. “Jump into work head first” is bodily, even reckless; it frames labor not as dutiful grind but as a plunge that risks bruises and demands full presence. Piercy’s admiration isn’t for mere productivity. It’s for a temperament: the refusal to hover at the edge of meaningful action, testing the temperature, waiting for permission, protecting one’s poise.

The real bite is in the second clause. “Without dallying in the shallows” turns hesitation into a kind of moral shallowness. The shallows are where you can still stand, still look composed, still retreat without consequence. To dally there is to choose safety over depth, to treat work as performance management rather than engagement. Piercy, a writer whose career is threaded through feminism and social critique, knows how often (especially for women, especially for artists and organizers) seriousness gets punished: you’re told to be careful, to be nice, to not be “too much.” Her sentence is a counter-charm against that cultural policing.

The intent is both intimate and instructive. It reads like praise, but it’s also a sorting mechanism: a quiet manifesto about who deserves your time. The subtext says depth isn’t a personality trait; it’s a decision you make at the moment you stop wading and start swimming, when you trade the comfort of control for the hard, clarifying pressure of real work.