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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
Career
Normal
Careers
Word
Business
Life
Divisive
Divides
Professional

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The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.
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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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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 write for the still, small possibility of justice.
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It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
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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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The only recognizable feature of hope is action.
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In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
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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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I am very interested in people trying to write because I don't have a big academic background at all.
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Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.
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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.
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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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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.
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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 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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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.
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I've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.
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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.
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No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.
Grace Paley