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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

More quotes by 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.
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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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I did write a number of reports on my political experiences, but there were many omissions, and I feel bad about that because it was work that was interesting and had I written more about it, it could have been useful.
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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.
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The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional 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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We write about what we don't know about what we know.
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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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I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.
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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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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.
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.
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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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You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.
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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To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.
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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My mother went to demonstrations. I remember her going to a big demonstration for Earl Brower and she came home crying and said the Communists were very mean and booed their people. I remember feeling sad at her feeling sad.
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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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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