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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

More quotes by 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.
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No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.
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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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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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If you're old and you're healthy and you're active - I don't mean you have to be politically active - if you remain interested in other people and the world, then you live as well as your health will allow.
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It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
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I've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.
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Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.
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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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My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.
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Art's too long and life's too short.
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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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Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
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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 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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Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
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Just when I most needed important conversation, a sniff of the man-wide world, that is, at least one brainy companion who could translate my friendly language into his tongue of undying carnal love, I was forced to lounge in our neighborhood park, surrounded by children.
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If you want to do things, do things.
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You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
Grace Paley