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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
Stills
Still
Writing
Possibility
Justice
Small
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 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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Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
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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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Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.
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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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You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.
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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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Today's wars are about oil. But alternate energies exist now - solar, wind - for every important energy-using activity in our lives. The only human work that cannot be done without oil is war.
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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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Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.
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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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I've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.
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No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.
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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 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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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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To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
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