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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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Grace Paley
Age: 84 †
Born: 1922
Born: December 11
Died: 2007
Died: August 21
Activist
Teacher
Writer
The Bronx
New York City
Eyes
People
Eye
Cockeyed
Idea
Cane
Money
Tapping
Ideas
Closed
Direction
Take
Sorry
Right
Growing
Really

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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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My family were Russian Jews. They got you to read as soon as you could. And then assumed you would read a lot. People didn't really tell stories but they were good talkers. That's important for a writer, to hear speakers.
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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 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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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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Well, by now you must know yourself, honey, whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.
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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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Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.
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Art's too long and life's too short.
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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.
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To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.
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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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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
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You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
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To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
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We write about what we don't know about what we know.
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It wasn't until I lived in the countryside that I began to understand the life of the countryside and the people in it and trees and water. Just learning about water is an education for a city person.
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No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.
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It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
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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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