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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.

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
People
Family
Speakers
Tell
Russian
Didn
Jews
Stories
Jew
Important
Soon
Really
Writer
Good
Hear
Talkers
Would
Read
Assumed

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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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You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
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I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
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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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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 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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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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Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.
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Today's wars are about oil. But alternate energies exist now - solar, wind - for every important energy-using activity in our lives. The only human work that cannot be done without oil is war.
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No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.
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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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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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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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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.
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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Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.
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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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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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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