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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

More quotes by Grace Paley

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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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Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.
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I've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.
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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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Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.
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I did write a number of reports on my political experiences, but there were many omissions, and I feel bad about that because it was work that was interesting and had I written more about it, it could have been useful.
Grace Paley
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For me, the meaning of life is the next generation.
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Art's too long and life's too short.
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.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley
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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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In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
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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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I write for the still, small possibility of justice.
Grace Paley
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I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley
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You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.
Grace Paley
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Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley