Top 100 Grace Paley Quotes
#1. Well, you have children so you know: little children little troubles, big children, big troubles - it's a saying in Yiddish. Maybe the Chinese said it too.
Grace Paley
#2. The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.
Grace Paley
#3. I finally understood that I didn't lack pen and paper but my own
memorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, called
rote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking,
a great human gift disowned.
Grace Paley
#4. What I'm interested in doing in a story is bringing certain different languages, people, events together and then letting the reader make what he wants of it.
Grace Paley
#5. Today's wars are about oil. But alternate energies exist now - solar, wind - for every important energy-using activity in our lives. The only human work that cannot be done without oil is war.
Grace Paley
#6. Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.
Grace Paley
#7. What I generally tell a class is that if you're not interested in anybody else's work but your own, take another class.
Grace Paley
#8. Whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.
Grace Paley
#9. It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
Grace Paley
#10. I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.
Grace Paley
#11. No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.
Grace Paley
#12. I write for the still, small possibility of justice.
Grace Paley
#13. I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.
Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.
He said, What? What life? No life of mine.
Grace Paley
#14. ... I go through a story for lies. I might discover the lie of trying to show off. Sometimes they're lies of character. Sometimes they are lies of writing the most beautiful sentence in the world that has nothing to do with the story.
Grace Paley
#15. In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
Grace Paley
#16. Happy!" He leaned over the rail and tried to hold her eyes. But that is hard to do, for eyes are born dodgers and know a whole circumference of ways out of a bad spot.
"Faith in the Afternoon
Grace Paley
#17. I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.
Grace Paley
#18. People will sometimes say, "Why don't you write more politics?" And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women IS politics.
Grace Paley
#19. That's the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic. You think they're extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they're just average with a good education.
Grace Paley
#20. Who cares?' said Judy, who didn't care.
Grace Paley
#21. Women should stick together. Didn't you learn anything yet?
Grace Paley
#22. But what's a writer for? The whole point is to put yourself into other lives, other heads-writers have always done that. If you screw up, so someone will tell you, that's all.
Grace Paley
#23. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
Grace Paley
#24. In a way he was lucky. He was a member of a generation that thought it
was a good, even joyous, political idea to put its brains, energy,
labor at the service of the people.
Grace Paley
#25. As an older person, I do feel an obligation to tell the story about what was really happening in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, as I saw it.
Grace Paley
#26. I don't have any degrees. I went to Hunter College one year and New York University another year. It's just on the basis of my books that I've been hired at any of the places I've been.
Grace Paley
#27. In the park I met other women and I started to get interested in their lives. I developed a lot of pressure to talk about women's lives, and children's lives, too. Children interest me tremendously.
Grace Paley
#29. Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.
Grace Paley
#30. Write what will stop your breath if you don't write.
Grace Paley
#31. There isn't a story written that isn't about blood and money. People and their relationship to each other is the blood, the family. And how they live, the money of it.
Grace Paley
#32. I begin by writing paragraphs that don't have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.
Grace Paley
#33. The men don't like their wives so much. They only get married if it's a good idea." Faith
Grace Paley
#34. I've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.
Grace Paley
#35. A relationship with young people is very important to me. It's important to have a sense of what's going on in their world and not just in my own. So the opportunity teaching provides is a gift.
Grace Paley
#36. When you think of things that influenced your life, Mother Goose influenced more people than almost any other thing, the rhythms of those poems. Everything after that was a bare imitation of some of those mysterious and materialistic poems.
Grace Paley
#37. I often see through things right to the apparition itself.
Grace Paley
#38. The wrong word is like a lie jammed inside the story.
Grace Paley
#39. I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.
Grace Paley
#40. I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
Grace Paley
#41. Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.
Grace Paley
#42. My family were Russian Jews. They got you to read as soon as you could. And then assumed you would read a lot. People didn't really tell stories but they were good talkers. That's important for a writer, to hear speakers.
Grace Paley
#43. I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them.
The librarian said $32 even and you've owed it for eighteen years. I didn't deny anything. Because I don't understand how time passes. I have had those books. I have often thought of them. The library is only two blocks away.
Grace Paley
#44. Air was filtering out of my two collapsing lungs. Water rose, bubbling to enter, and I would have died of instantaneous pneumonia - something I have never heard of - if my hand had not got hold of a glass ashtray and, entirely apart from my personal decision, flung it.
Grace Paley
#45. Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
Grace Paley
#46. I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.
Grace Paley
#47. The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.
Grace Paley
#48. I read a lot. I liked a tremendous number of poets and writers. The person whose work I liked the most was Joyce.
Grace Paley
#49. I see women as oppressed, but I don't see them as victims; I see them rising all the time. I see them as very strong.
Grace Paley
#50. You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
Grace Paley
#51. If I miss anything, it's being able to hang out in the city of New York meeting people and talking to them on the corner.
Grace Paley
#52. Let her live in the air,' said Peter. 'I bet you do. Let her love her body.'
'Let her,' said Anna sadly.
Grace Paley
#53. You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it ... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.
Grace Paley
#54. What we owe men is some freedom from their part in a murderous game in which they kick each other to death with one foot, bracing themselves on our various comfortable places with the other.
Grace Paley
#55. My job is to get people to write something truthful, something about truth and beauty - wherever they are - and to understand how literature is made. And then if they become great writers, that's great, and probably has nothing to do with me.
Grace Paley
#56. If you're feminist, it means that you've noticed that male ownership of the direction of female lives has been the order of the day for a few thousand years, and it isn't natural.
Grace Paley
#57. 'The Immigrant Story,' which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn't think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That's the only way you get it sometimes.
Grace Paley
#58. I didn't intend. The word "intend" is the wrong word for what I do. It's just that it's something you do, and you can't not do. If you want to do it, and you don't intend to, you do it anyway. The word "intend" is wrong. The word "pressure" is right. It's like any art form.
Grace Paley
#59. Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.
Grace Paley
#60. I'm really sorry for people growing up right now, because they have some cockeyed idea that they can get by with their eyes closed; the cane they're tapping is money, and that won't take them in the right direction.
Grace Paley
#61. Oh no," she says. Soft because I am the older one, but very strong. (I've noticed it. All of a sudden they look at you, and then it comes to them, young people, they are bound to outlast you, so they temper up their icy steel and stare into about an inch away from you a lot. Have you noticed it?) At
Grace Paley
#62. I loved the comradeship of the sixties and the seventies, and I still maintain friendships with the people I worked with then - the ones that are still alive. That's one of the great gifts of our political movements, great friendships ... and also a few enmities.
Grace Paley
#63. Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.
Grace Paley
#64. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.
Grace Paley
#65. That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality.
Grace Paley
#66. People say, "Why do you call your kids up, why do you worry like that?" And I say, "I was raised like that." My grandmother looked at my father with the same eyes when he was sixty and she was eighty-five.
Grace Paley
#67. Every time you finish something ... you figure you've finally learned to write, right? Then you start something else and it turns out you haven't. You have learned how to write that story, or that book, but you haven't learned how to write the next one.
Grace Paley
#68. I lived in a house in the East Bronx, a totally Jewish neighborhood on East 172nd Street. You didn't see Christians much, although one lived next door. We thought they were kind of a minority.
Grace Paley
#69. Paul Goodman was not ahead of his time but IN his time.
Grace Paley
#70. Most of the Women's Libbers I knew really didn't want to have a piece of the men's pie. They thought that pie was kind of poisonous, toxic, really full of weapons, poison gases, all kinds of mean junk we didn't even want a slice of.
Grace Paley
#71. I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.
Grace Paley
#72. Remembering is organized for significance (not usefulness)
Grace Paley
#73. I have a basic indolence about me which is essential to writing ... It's thinking time, it's hanging-out time, it's daydreaming time. You know, it's lie-around-the-bed time, it's sitting-like-a-dope-in-your-chair time. And that seems to me essential to any work.
Grace Paley
#74. You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.
Grace Paley
#75. Art is too long, and life is too short,
Grace Paley
#76. The only recognizable feature of hope is action.
Grace Paley
#77. If you're old and you're healthy and you're active - I don't mean you have to be politically active - if you remain interested in other people and the world, then you live as well as your health will allow.
Grace Paley
#78. When you have a peace movement that has an actual war, it's different from one that has wars that our country is not totally involved in. During the war in Vietnam, and to a lesser degree the wars in Central America where our country was directly involved, it was easier to organize.
Grace Paley
#79. You write from what you know but you write into what you don't know.
Grace Paley
#80. The younger people with the ache of youth were eating all the cheese.
Grace Paley
#81. Old age is not a good thing. It can be really hard, and those of us who have it a little easier should keep in mind that there are hundreds of thousands of people who are not as well off.
Grace Paley
#82. Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in.
Grace Paley
#83. Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world. That's why it almost always has to be on the side of the underdog.
Grace Paley
#85. My mother went to demonstrations. I remember her going to a big demonstration for Earl Brower and she came home crying and said the Communists were very mean and booed their people. I remember feeling sad at her feeling sad.
Grace Paley
#86. In prose, I think you sometimes have to write in very plain language, where every line may not seem to be so important, though in all writing every line is important.
Grace Paley
#87. I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.
Grace Paley
#88. I checked out the two Edith Wharton books I had just returned because I'd read them so long ago and they are more apropos now than ever. They were The House of Mirth and The Children, which is about how life in the United States in New York changed in twenty-seven years fifty years ago.
("Wants")
Grace Paley
#89. It wasn't until I lived in the countryside that I began to understand the life of the countryside and the people in it and trees and water. Just learning about water is an education for a city person.
Grace Paley
#90. All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.
Grace Paley
#91. We write about what we don't know about what we know ...
Grace Paley
#93. Write from what you know into what you don't know.
Grace Paley
#94. There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.
Grace Paley
#95. I didn't intend to become a short-story writer. I became one because I finished a couple of short stories and realized that's what I wanted to do and could do with children and with all the other things in my life.
Grace Paley
#96. Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.
Grace Paley
#97. I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the women's movement. I didn't know my small-drop presence or usefulness in this accumulation.
Grace Paley
#98. It is possible with only a little extra anguish
to live in this world at absolute [minimum?]
loving brainy sexual energetic redeemed
Grace Paley
#99. To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
Grace Paley
#100. Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
Grace Paley
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