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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
Beach
Wave
Land
Reversible
Waves

More quotes by 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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We write about what we don't know about what we know.
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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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The only recognizable feature of hope is action.
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Today's wars are about oil. But alternate energies exist now - solar, wind - for every important energy-using activity in our lives. The only human work that cannot be done without oil is war.
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You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.
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If you want to do things, do things.
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To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
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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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Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?
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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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.
Grace Paley
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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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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.
Grace Paley
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To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.
Grace Paley
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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.
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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Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley