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You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.

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
Mind
Erotic
Astonishing
Living
Thing
Long

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Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
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I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
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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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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.
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In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
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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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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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Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.
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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 was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
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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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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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That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality.
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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
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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 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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It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
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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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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 didn't intend. The word intend is the wrong word for what I do. It's just that it's something you do, and you can't not do. If you want to do it, and you don't intend to, you do it anyway. The word intend is wrong. The word pressure is right. It's like any art form.
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