Grace Paley Quotes - Page 3

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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.

  Grace Paley

  People, Important, Stories

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Grace Paley

  Men, Games, Feet

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Grace Paley

  Children, Chinese, Littles

  Grace Paley (2014). “The Collected Stories”, p.357, Macmillan

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Grace Paley

  Country, War, America

  4 Copy quote

• There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.

  Grace Paley

  Knowing, Long, Long Time

  Grace Paley (2014). “The Collected Stories”, p.132, Macmillan

  6 Copy quote

• I was fortunate that by the time I was born, there were a lot of comforts and at the same time I lived in a neighborhood where it was brought to my eyes every single day that people didn't live like me. Every day I knew that many of my friends "got relief." That was important in my thinking about the world, thinking that not everybody lived that way.

  Grace Paley

  Eye, Thinking, People

  4 Copy quote

• If you're feminist, it means that you've noticed that male ownership of the direction of female lives has been the order of the day for a few thousand years, and it isn't natural.

  Grace Paley

  Mean, Order, Years

  Grace Paley (2014). “Just As I Thought”, p.163, Macmillan

  5 Copy quote

• In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.

  Grace Paley

  Long, Rewards, Life Is

  Grace Paley (2014). “The Collected Stories”, p.30, Macmillan

  6 Copy quote

• Old age is not a good thing. It can be really hard, and those of us who have it a little easier should keep in mind that there are hundreds of thousands of people who are not as well off.

  Grace Paley

  People, Mind, Age

  4 Copy quote

• I've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.

  Grace Paley

  Pages, Seven, Novel

  5 Copy quote

• Most of the Womens Libbers I knew really didnt want to have a piece of the mens pie. They thought that pie was kind of poisonous, toxic, really full of weapons, poison gases, all kinds of mean junk we didnt even want a slice of.

  Grace Paley

  Mean, Pie, Junk

  Grace Paley (2014). “Just As I Thought”, p.245, Macmillan

  8 Copy quote

• My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.

  Grace Paley

  Writing, Vocabulary, Useless

  Grace Paley (2014). “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories”, p.85, Macmillan

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• I'm really sorry for people growing up right now, because they have some cockeyed idea that they can get by with their eyes closed; the cane they're tapping is money, and that won't take them in the right direction.

  Grace Paley

  Growing Up, Sorry, Eye

  Grace Paley, Gerhard Bach, Blaine H. Hall (1997). “Conversations with Grace Paley”, p.129, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  4 Copy quote

• When you think of things that influenced your life, Mother Goose influenced more people than almost any other thing, the rhythms of those poems. Everything after that was a bare imitation of some of those mysterious and materialistic poems.

  Grace Paley

  Mother, Thinking, People

  8 Copy quote

• Art's too long and life's too short.

  Grace Paley

  Art, Long, Too Short

  Grace Paley, Gerhard Bach, Blaine H. Hall (1997). “Conversations with Grace Paley”, p.177, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  8 Copy quote

• I didn't intend. The word "intend" is the wrong word for what I do. It's just that it's something you do, and you can't not do. If you want to do it, and you don't intend to, you do it anyway. The word "intend" is wrong. The word "pressure" is right. It's like any art form.

  Grace Paley

  Art, Want, Pressure

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Grace Paley

  New York, Book, College

  5 Copy quote

• Art is too long, and life is too short.

  Grace Paley

  Art, Life Is Too Short, Long

  Grace Paley, Gerhard Bach, Blaine H. Hall (1997). “Conversations with Grace Paley”, p.177, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Grace Paley

  Stories, Saws, Obligation

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Reading, Literature, University

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• A lot of sad things have happened to my friends' children, people you knew as babies. They've been killed or become crazy or all kinds of tragic things. There are some people whose children haven't talked to them in fifteen years. There's all kind of meshugaas in this world.

  Grace Paley

  Baby, Children, Crazy

  6 Copy quote

• People say, "Why do you call your kids up, why do you worry like that?" And I say, "I was raised like that." My grandmother looked at my father with the same eyes when he was sixty and she was eighty-five.

  Grace Paley

  Father, Kids, Eye

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• I'm seventy-five now. I also have the peculiar luck of having a sister and brother who are fourteen and sixteen years older than me. Their health is not good. It couldn't be at that age. But their spirits are. Both my brother and my sister are an example to me.

  Grace Paley

  Brother, Years, Luck

  5 Copy quote

• This hill crossed with broken pines and maples lumpy with the burial mounds of uprooted hemlocks (hurricane of '38) out of their rotting hearts generations rise trying once more to become the forest just beyond them tall enough to be called trees in their youth like aspen a bouquet of young beech is gathered they still wear last summer's leaves the lightest brown almost translucent how their stubbornness has decorated the winter woods.

  Grace Paley

  Summer, Spring, Heart

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Women, Important

  Grace Paley (2014). “The Collected Stories”, p.175, Macmillan

  5 Copy quote

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