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I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.

Grace Paley

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Grace Paley
Age: 84 †
Born: 1922
Born: December 11
Died: 2007
Died: August 21
Activist
Teacher
Writer
The Bronx
New York City
Believe
Senses
Medicine
Civilization
Philosophy
Education
Body
Persons
Soma
Person
Educate

More quotes by Grace Paley

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I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.
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I've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.
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I should have written more. I should have written more during the period when I just liked so much doing the political work in the streets.
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That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality.
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I did write a number of reports on my political experiences, but there were many omissions, and I feel bad about that because it was work that was interesting and had I written more about it, it could have been useful.
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Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.
Grace Paley
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Just when I most needed important conversation, a sniff of the man-wide world, that is, at least one brainy companion who could translate my friendly language into his tongue of undying carnal love, I was forced to lounge in our neighborhood park, surrounded by children.
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If you want to do things, do things.
Grace Paley
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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
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To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
Grace Paley
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Well, by now you must know yourself, honey, whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.
Grace Paley
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Art's too long and life's too short.
Grace Paley
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My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.
Grace Paley
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When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write stories in my mid-thirties. My kids were still little, and they were in school and day care, and I had begun to think a lot about wanting to tell some stories and not being able to do it in poetry.
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No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.
Grace Paley
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Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
Grace Paley
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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
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I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.
Grace Paley
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Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.
Grace Paley
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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