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

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It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
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I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
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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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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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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
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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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Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
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Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.
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In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
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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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People will sometimes say, Why don't you write more politics? And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women IS politics.
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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.
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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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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 don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
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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.
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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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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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