Life & Wisdom Quote by Marge Piercy

Rest is the fantasy of arriving; transformation is the wager that arrival is a lie. Marge Piercy’s line refuses the soothing modern promise that the self can be “fixed” and then preserved, like a renovated apartment you never have to touch again. Instead, it frames living as perpetual revision: not recovery-as-endpoint, but change-as-condition. The phrasing “seek not” has the sound of manifesto, a deliberate turning away from comfort as a political and ethical choice. Piercy isn’t romanticizing exhaustion; she’s puncturing the idea that stability is the highest good.

The most arresting move is the plural “we.” This isn’t private self-help; it’s collective metamorphosis. In Piercy’s work, the personal is never sealed off from systems - gender, labor, power. “We are dancing through each other” suggests intimacy without possession: bodies and lives intersecting, affecting one another, then shifting shape. Dancing implies consent, rhythm, mutual attunement. It’s change that happens with, not just to, us.

“As doorways” turns people into thresholds rather than destinations. A doorway is utilitarian, transitional, easily overlooked - which is precisely the point. Piercy’s subtext is anti-hoarding: of identity, of certainty, of other people. You don’t “own” a doorway; you pass through it and come out altered. In a late-20th-century feminist context that challenged fixed roles and “natural” hierarchies, the line reads like an argument for fluid selves, porous communities, and the radical idea that being remade by others is not a threat but a practice.