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My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.

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
Life
Vocabulary
Keeping
Useless
Notes
Active
Absolutely
Journals
Moral
Journal
Writing
Adequate

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Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
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I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
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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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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
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We write about what we don't know about what we know.
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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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I am very interested in people trying to write because I don't have a big academic background at all.
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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.
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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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If you want to do things, do things.
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You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.
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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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In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
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A joke is necessary at this time.
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To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.
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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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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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Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
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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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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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