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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.

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
Tell
Seventies
Stories
Sixty
Persons
Obligation
Person
Happenings
Feel
Happening
Feels
Older
Really
Saws
Fifties
Story
Sixties

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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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A joke is necessary at this time.
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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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If you want to do things, do things.
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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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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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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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You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.
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You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
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Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
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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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Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
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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 didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.
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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
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I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
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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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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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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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