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

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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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I am very interested in people trying to write because I don't have a big academic background at all.
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You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
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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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To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
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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've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.
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Art's too long and life's too short.
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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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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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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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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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The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.
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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
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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 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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For me, the meaning of life is the next generation.
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I liked the education. I liked people learning things all around me and I liked going to people's classes.
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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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Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
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