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Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of 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
Deserve
Destiny
Open
Everyone
Real
Life
Deserves
Invented

More quotes by Grace Paley

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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.
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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.
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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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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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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've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.
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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.
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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I know I've done good work. I've been very serious about my writing, and I've done the best that I could. But I don't feel that I've done more than I should have. In fact, I've done less than I should have.
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If you want to do things, do things.
Grace Paley
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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
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It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
Grace Paley
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I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.
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Art's too long and life's too short.
Grace Paley
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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.
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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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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That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality.
Grace Paley
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A joke is necessary at this time.
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You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.
Grace Paley