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We write about what we don't know about what we know.

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
Write
Writing

More quotes by Grace Paley

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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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I've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.
Grace Paley
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If you want to do things, do things.
Grace Paley
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That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality.
Grace Paley
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The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.
Grace Paley
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For me, the meaning of life is the next generation.
Grace Paley
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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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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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Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.
Grace Paley
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Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley
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To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.
Grace Paley
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I liked the education. I liked people learning things all around me and I liked going to people's classes.
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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A joke is necessary at this time.
Grace Paley
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Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley
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It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
Grace Paley