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Art's too long and life's too short.

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
Short
Art
Long
Life

More quotes by 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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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.
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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The only recognizable feature of hope is action.
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.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley
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The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.
Grace Paley
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You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley
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I have a basic indolence about me which is essential to writing. ... It's thinking time, it's hanging-out time, it's daydreaming time. You know, it's lie-around-the-bed time, it's sitting-like-a-dope-in-your-chair time. And that seems to me essential to any work.
Grace Paley
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Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.
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.
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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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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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley
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If you want to do things, do things.
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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I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
Grace Paley
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It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
Grace Paley