Life & Wisdom Quote by Marge Piercy

Piercy’s line slices through the sentimental fog we like to wrap around relationships, institutions, even habits: if something isn’t actively giving you fuel, it’s quietly draining you. The brilliance is in the ruthless binary. “Whatever” doesn’t leave room for pet exceptions or comforting gray areas; it reads like a law of thermodynamics smuggled into daily life. By framing the world in the language of energy, Piercy dodges moralizing. She doesn’t call a person “bad” or a job “toxic.” She measures what it costs.

The subtext is a feminist and labor-aware warning: women, especially, are trained to become rechargeable batteries for everyone else’s needs. Domestic work, emotional caretaking, the endless “being there” can be pitched as virtue while functioning as extraction. Piercy’s phrasing turns that extraction into something you can name without apology. If your life is structured around constant output with no replenishment, you aren’t noble; you’re being used.

Context matters, too. Piercy’s work often maps the politics of everyday survival - how power hides in routines, and how personal boundaries are a form of resistance. “Energy source” implies reciprocity, creativity, and forward motion; “energy sink” implies entropy, stagnation, a system that absorbs your vitality and returns nothing. The intent isn’t to make you paranoid; it’s to make you strategic. A life worth living requires budgets, and energy is the one you can’t borrow indefinitely.