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I should have written more. I should have written more during the period when I just liked so much doing the political work in the streets.

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
Much
Liked
Period
Periods
Streets
Written
Political
Work

More quotes by Grace Paley

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Art's too long and life's too short.
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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 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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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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In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
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Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.
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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.
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Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of 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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If you want to do things, do things.
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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.
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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 am very interested in people trying to write because I don't have a big academic background at all.
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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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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.
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Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.
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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
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I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.
Grace Paley
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I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
Grace Paley