Quote

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

Grace Paley

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.
Grace Paley
Image
I should have written more. I should have written more during the period when I just liked so much doing the political work in the streets.
Grace Paley
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
Grace Paley
Image
The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.
Grace Paley
Image
Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.
Grace Paley
Image
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.
Grace Paley
Image
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
Image
Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?
Grace Paley
Image
That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality.
Grace Paley
Image
Well, you have children so you know: little children little troubles, big children, big troubles - it's a saying in Yiddish. Maybe the Chinese said it too.
Grace Paley
Image
The only recognizable feature of hope is action.
Grace Paley
Image
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
Image
Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
Grace Paley
Image
Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.
Grace Paley
Image
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
Image
If you want to do things, do things.
Grace Paley
Image
No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.
Grace Paley
Image
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.
Grace Paley