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To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.

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
Something
Modest
Means
Mean

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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 write for the still, small possibility of justice.
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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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No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.
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Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
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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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Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.
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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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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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To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
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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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If you want to do things, do things.
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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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Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?
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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 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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My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.
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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.
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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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I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
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