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Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.

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
Reversible
Waves
Beach
Wave
Land

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In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
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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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I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.
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I write for the still, small possibility of justice.
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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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Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?
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I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
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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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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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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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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
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To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.
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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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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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I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.
Grace Paley
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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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If you want to do things, do things.
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.
Grace Paley