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I write for the still, small possibility of justice.

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
Small
Write
Stills
Still
Writing
Possibility
Justice

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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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You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
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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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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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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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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
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I don't have any degrees. I went to Hunter College one year and New York University another year. It's just on the basis of my books that I've been hired at any of the places I've been.
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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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Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.
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No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.
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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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Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
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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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You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.
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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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Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.
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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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We write about what we don't know about what we know.
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For me, the meaning of life is the next generation.
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I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
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