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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
Astonishing
Living
Thing
Long
Mind
Erotic

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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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Well, by now you must know yourself, honey, whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.
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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 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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You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
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Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.
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A joke is necessary at this time.
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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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Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.
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It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
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In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
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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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Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.
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It wasn't until I lived in the countryside that I began to understand the life of the countryside and the people in it and trees and water. Just learning about water is an education for a city person.
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Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
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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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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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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 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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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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