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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
Erotic
Astonishing
Living
Thing
Long
Mind

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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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Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.
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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 did write a number of reports on my political experiences, but there were many omissions, and I feel bad about that because it was work that was interesting and had I written more about it, it could have been useful.
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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
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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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In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
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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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I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
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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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Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.
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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 didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.
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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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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'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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To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
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Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
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You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
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Art's too long and life's too short.
Grace Paley