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No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.

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
Muddy
Mock
Nurture
Metaphor
Except
Jobs
Children
Reinvents

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Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.
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The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.
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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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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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The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.
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I write for the still, small possibility of justice.
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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.
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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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The only recognizable feature of hope is action.
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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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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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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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Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?
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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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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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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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To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.
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For me, the meaning of life is the next generation.
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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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Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.
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