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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.

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
Live
People
Relationship
Blood
Written
Story
Family
Money
Stories

More quotes by Grace Paley

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Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
Grace Paley
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My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.
Grace Paley
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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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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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To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley
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When you have a peace movement that has an actual war, it's different from one that has wars that our country is not totally involved in. During the war in Vietnam, and to a lesser degree the wars in Central America where our country was directly involved, it was easier to organize.
Grace Paley
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My family were Russian Jews. They got you to read as soon as you could. And then assumed you would read a lot. People didn't really tell stories but they were good talkers. That's important for a writer, to hear speakers.
Grace Paley
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If you want to do things, do things.
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Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.
Grace Paley
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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.
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.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley
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I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.
Grace Paley
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Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
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
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Art's too long and life's too short.
Grace Paley
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I write for the still, small possibility of justice.
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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No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.
Grace Paley