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To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.

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
Translate
Poem
English
Takes
Night
Writing
Thinking

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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.
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To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.
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If you want to do things, do things.
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Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?
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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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It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
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Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.
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My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.
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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.
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Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
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No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.
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I write for the still, small possibility of justice.
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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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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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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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Art's too long and life's too short.
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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 didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.
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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.
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Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.
Grace Paley