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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.

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
Trouble
Maybe
Bigs
Littles
Little
Yiddish
Wells
Troubles
Well
Chinese
Children
Saying

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It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
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Art's too long and life's too short.
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To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
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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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Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.
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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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In the park I met other women and I started to get interested in their lives. I developed a lot of pressure to talk about women's lives, and children's lives, too. Children interest me tremendously.
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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.
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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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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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Well, by now you must know yourself, honey, whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.
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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
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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.
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A joke is necessary at this time.
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You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
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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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No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.
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Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
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In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
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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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