Quote

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

More quotes by Grace Paley

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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.
Grace Paley
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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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I've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.
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I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
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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 believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.
Grace Paley
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If you want to do things, do things.
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.
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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.
Grace Paley
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In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
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We write about what we don't know about what we know.
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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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 did write a number of reports on my political experiences, but there were many omissions, and I feel bad about that because it was work that was interesting and had I written more about it, it could have been useful.
Grace Paley
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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
Grace Paley
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Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.
Grace Paley
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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.
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.
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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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