Grace Paley Quotations

Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.

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

If you want to do things, do things.

All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.

I see women as oppressed, but I don't see them as victims; I see them rising all the time. I see them as very strong.

I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.

Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.

'The Immigrant Story,' which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn't think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That's the only way you get it sometimes.

Most of the Women's Libbers I knew really didn't want to have a piece of the men's pie. They thought that pie was kind of poisonous, toxic, really full of weapons, poison gases, all kinds of mean junk we didn't even want a slice of.

I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the women's movement. I didn't know my small-drop presence or usefulness in this accumulation.

I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.

I often see through things right to the apparition itself.

The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.

Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.

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

Whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.

You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.

You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.

A relationship with young people is very important to me. It's important to have a sense of what's going on in their world and not just in my own. So the opportunity teaching provides is a gift.

That's the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic. You think they're extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they're just average with a good education.

I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.

Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.

What I generally tell a class is that if you're not interested in anybody else's work but your own, take another class.

Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in.

I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.

In prose, I think you sometimes have to write in very plain language, where every line may not seem to be so important, though in all writing every line is important.

What I'm interested in doing in a story is bringing certain different languages, people, events together and then letting the reader make what he wants of it.

. . . 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.

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

It wasn't until I lived in the countryside that I began to understand the life of the countryside and the people in it and trees and water. Just learning about water is an education for a city person.

I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.

Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.

I loved the comradeship of the sixties and the seventies, and I still maintain friendships with the people I worked with then - the ones that are still alive. That's one of the great gifts of our political movements, great friendships . . . and also a few enmities.

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.

I read a lot. I liked a tremendous number of poets and writers. The person whose work I liked the most was Joyce.

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.

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.

Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.

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.

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.

If I miss anything, it's being able to hang out in the city of New York meeting people and talking to them on the corner.

It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.

No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.

Paul Goodman was not ahead of his time but IN his time.

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.

Write from what you know into what you don't know.

My mother went to demonstrations. I remember her going to a big demonstration for Earl Brower and she came home crying and said the Communists were very mean and booed their people. I remember feeling sad at her feeling sad.

The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.

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.

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

Art is too long, and life is too short,

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.

I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.

Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.

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.

I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.

To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.

The wrong word is like a lie jammed inside the story.

To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.

For me, the meaning of life is the next generation.

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.

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.

Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.

Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.

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.

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

That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality.

You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.

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.

We write about what we don't know about what we know....

A joke is necessary at this time.

Well, by now you must know yourself, honey, whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.

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.

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.

You come to doing what you do by not being able to do something.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I write for the still, small possibility of justice.

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.

Here I am in the garden laughing an old woman with heavy breasts and a nicely mapped face how did this happen well that's who I wanted to be at last a woman in the old style sitting stout thighs apart under a big skirt grandchild sliding on off my lap a pleasant summer perspiration that's my old man across the yard he's talking to the meter reader he's telling him the world's sad story how electricity is oil or uranium and so forth I tell my grandson run over to your grandpa ask him to sit beside me for a minute I am suddenly exhausted by my desire to kiss his sweet explaining lips.

I liked the education. I liked people learning things all around me and I liked going to people's classes.

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.

My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.

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.

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.

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.

The only recognizable feature of hope is action.

Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world. That's why it almost always has to be on the side of the underdog.

I am very interested in people trying to write because I don't have a big academic background at all.

But what's a writer for? The whole point is to put yourself into other lives, other heads-writers have always done that. If you screw up, so someone will tell you, that's all.

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.

Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?

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.

…I go through a story for lies. I might discover the lie of trying to show off. Sometimes they’re lies of character. Sometimes they are lies of writing the most beautiful sentence in the world that has nothing to do with the story.

I have a basic indolence about me which is essential to writing. ... It's thinking time, it's hanging-out time, it's daydreaming time. You know, it's lie-around-the-bed time, it's sitting-like-a-dope-in-your-chair time. And that seems to me essential to any work.

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.

I didn't intend to become a short-story writer. I became one because I finished a couple of short stories and realized that's what I wanted to do and could do with children and with all the other things in my life.