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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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Grace Paley
Age: 84 †
Born: 1922
Born: December 11
Died: 2007
Died: August 21
Activist
Teacher
Writer
The Bronx
New York City
Work
Less
Good
Fact
Facts
Best
Done
Feel
Feels
Writing
Serious

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I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
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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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Well, you have children so you know: little children little troubles, big children, big troubles - it's a saying in Yiddish. Maybe the Chinese said it too.
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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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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.
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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 really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.
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No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.
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It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
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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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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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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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My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.
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You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
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.
Grace Paley
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Art's too long and life's too short.
Grace Paley
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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.
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.
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Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.
Grace Paley