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What we owe men is some freedom from their part in a murderous game in which they kick each other to death with one foot, bracing themselves on our various comfortable places with the other.

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
Freedom
Kicks
Death
Foot
Part
Various
Men
Places
Comfortable
Feet
Bracing
Game
Murderous
Games
Kick

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I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.
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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
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I have a basic indolence about me which is essential to writing. ... It's thinking time, it's hanging-out time, it's daydreaming time. You know, it's lie-around-the-bed time, it's sitting-like-a-dope-in-your-chair time. And that seems to me essential to any work.
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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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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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Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.
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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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It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
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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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No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.
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Art's too long and life's too short.
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You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.
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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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To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.
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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.
Grace Paley
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You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
Grace Paley
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If you want to do things, do things.
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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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Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
Grace Paley
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In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
Grace Paley