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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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In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
Grace Paley
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To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
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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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
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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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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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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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I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
Grace Paley
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Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley
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I am very interested in people trying to write because I don't have a big academic background at all.
Grace Paley
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Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley
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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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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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Art's too long and life's too short.
Grace Paley
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It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
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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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 didn't intend. The word intend is the wrong word for what I do. It's just that it's something you do, and you can't not do. If you want to do it, and you don't intend to, you do it anyway. The word intend is wrong. The word pressure is right. It's like any art form.
Grace Paley