Quote

The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.

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
Word
Business
Life
Divisive
Divides
Professional
Career
Normal
Careers

More quotes by Grace Paley

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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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Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.
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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.
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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.
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I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.
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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
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Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?
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If you want to do things, do things.
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To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.
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I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
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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
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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.
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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.
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I write for the still, small possibility of justice.
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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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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
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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
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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.
Grace Paley
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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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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.
Grace Paley