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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.

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
Health
Live
Wells
Politically
Well
Active
Mean
Remain
World
Allow
People
Interested
Healthy

More quotes by Grace Paley

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Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
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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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I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
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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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My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.
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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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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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The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.
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There isn't a story written that isn't about blood and money. People and their relationship to each other is the blood, the family. And how they live, the money of it.
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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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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.
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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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Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
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I know I've done good work. I've been very serious about my writing, and I've done the best that I could. But I don't feel that I've done more than I should have. In fact, I've done less than I should have.
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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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.
Grace Paley
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A joke is necessary at this time.
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To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
Grace Paley
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It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
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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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