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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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Grace Paley
Age: 84 †
Born: 1922
Born: December 11
Died: 2007
Died: August 21
Activist
Teacher
Writer
The Bronx
New York City
Talk
Tremendously
Interest
Park
Lives
Parks
Women
Developed
Children
Mets
Pressure
Interested
Started

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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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Just when I most needed important conversation, a sniff of the man-wide world, that is, at least one brainy companion who could translate my friendly language into his tongue of undying carnal love, I was forced to lounge in our neighborhood park, surrounded by children.
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You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.
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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.
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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.
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I liked the education. I liked people learning things all around me and I liked going to people's classes.
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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.
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We write about what we don't know about what we know.
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It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
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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.
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I write for the still, small possibility of justice.
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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
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The only recognizable feature of hope is action.
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I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
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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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That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality.
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