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Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.

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
Also
Good
Talkers
People
Speech
Listen
Interesting
Language
Use
Energy

More quotes by Grace Paley

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Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?
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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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Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.
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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 saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library. Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified. He said, What? What life? No life of mine.
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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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The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.
Grace Paley
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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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The only recognizable feature of hope is action.
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To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
Grace Paley
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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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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
Grace Paley
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No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.
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I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
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To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.
Grace Paley
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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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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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I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.
Grace Paley
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You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.
Grace Paley
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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