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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
Writing
Possibility
Justice
Small
Write
Stills
Still

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Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
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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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Just when I most needed important conversation, a sniff of the man-wide world, that is, at least one brainy companion who could translate my friendly language into his tongue of undying carnal love, I was forced to lounge in our neighborhood park, surrounded by children.
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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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Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.
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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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My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.
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I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.
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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've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.
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We write about what we don't know about what we know.
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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
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If you're old and you're healthy and you're active - I don't mean you have to be politically active - if you remain interested in other people and the world, then you live as well as your health will allow.
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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 you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.
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Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.
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I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
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I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library. Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified. He said, What? What life? No life of mine.
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You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.
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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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