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I am very interested in people trying to write because I don't have a big academic background at all.

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
Bigs
Write
Writing
Trying
People
Academic
Background
Backgrounds
Interested

More quotes by Grace Paley

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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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Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.
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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I liked the education. I liked people learning things all around me and I liked going to people's classes.
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I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
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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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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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To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.
Grace Paley
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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley
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We write about what we don't know about what we know.
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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I write for the still, small possibility of justice.
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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Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley
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It wasn't until I lived in the countryside that I began to understand the life of the countryside and the people in it and trees and water. Just learning about water is an education for a city person.
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 vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.
Grace Paley