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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.

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
Already
Saying
Language
Sometimes
Love
People

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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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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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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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You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.
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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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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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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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Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.
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We write about what we don't know about what we know.
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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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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.
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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
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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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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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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.
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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Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?
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To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
Grace Paley