Quote

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

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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
Something
Anyway
Like
Pressure
Word
Wrong
Art
Didn
Form
Right
Intend

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To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.
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Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.
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I write for the still, small possibility of justice.
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Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.
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In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
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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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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 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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Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.
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You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
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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 only recognizable feature of hope is action.
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As an older person, I do feel an obligation to tell the story about what was really happening in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, as I saw it.
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I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.
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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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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 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.
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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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Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?
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