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I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.

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
Fiction
Write
Didn
Past
Writing
Thirty

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I've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.
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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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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.
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No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.
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To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
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Art's too long and life's too short.
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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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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 am very interested in people trying to write because I don't have a big academic background at all.
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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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The only recognizable feature of hope is action.
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Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
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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 you have a peace movement that has an actual war, it's different from one that has wars that our country is not totally involved in. During the war in Vietnam, and to a lesser degree the wars in Central America where our country was directly involved, it was easier to organize.
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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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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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In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
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For me, the meaning of life is the next generation.
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Today's wars are about oil. But alternate energies exist now - solar, wind - for every important energy-using activity in our lives. The only human work that cannot be done without oil is war.
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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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