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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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Grace Paley
Age: 84 †
Born: 1922
Born: December 11
Died: 2007
Died: August 21
Activist
Teacher
Writer
The Bronx
New York City
Stretch
Voices
Writer
Voice
Jobs
Believe
Really

More quotes by Grace Paley

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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 write for the still, small possibility of justice.
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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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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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We write about what we don't know about what we know.
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The only recognizable feature of hope is action.
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No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.
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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 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 don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
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A joke is necessary at this time.
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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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Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.
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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.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley
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People will sometimes say, Why don't you write more politics? And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women IS politics.
Grace Paley
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To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
Grace Paley
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I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
Grace Paley
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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