Grace Paley Quotes

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.

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.

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

Paley said of her dreams for her grandchildren: "It would be a world without militarism and racism and greed – and where women don't have to fight for their place in the world.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

At this very moment, the thumb of Ricardo's hovering shadow jabbed her in her left eye, revealing for all the world the shallowness of her water table. Rice could have been planted at that instant on the terraces of her flesh and sprouted in strength and beauty in the floods that overwhelmed her from that moment on through all the afternoon.

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.

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.

Since I was a big reader, I might be able to accomplish something. I
had no gift. That didn't mean I must be a deprived person. Besides,
why had the Enlightenment poured its seductive light all across the
European continent right into the poor endangered households of
Ukrainian Jews? Probably, my mother thought, so that a child, any
child (even a tone-deaf one), could be given a chance despite genetic
deficiency to become, in my mother's embarrassed hopeful world, a
whole person.

If you want to do things, do things.

By love, she probably meant she would die without being in love. By in
love, she meant the acuteness of the heart at the sudden sight of a
particular person or the way over a couple of years of interested
friendship one is suddenly stunned by the lungs' longing for more and
more breath in the presence of that friend, or nearly drowned to the
knees by the salty spring that seems to beat for years on our vaginal
shores. Not to omit all sorts of imaginings which assure great
spiritual energy for months and, when luck follows truth, years.

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.

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 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.

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 often see through things right to the apparition itself.

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

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

Who cares?' said Judy, who didn't care.

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 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.

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

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

In a way he was lucky. He was a member of a generation that thought it
was a good, even joyous, political idea to put its brains, energy,
labor at the service of the people.

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.

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.

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.

My job is to get people to write something truthful, something about truth and beauty - wherever they are - and to understand how literature is made. And then if they become great writers, that's great, and probably has nothing to do with me.

It is possible with only a little extra anguish
to live in this world at absolute [minimum?]
loving brainy sexual energetic redeemed

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.

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

Edie didn't budge. She leaned her chin on her knees and felt sad. She was a big reader too, but she liked THE BOBBSEY TWINS or HONEY BUNCH AT THE SEASHORE. She loved that nice family life. She tried to live it in the three rooms on the fourth floor. Sometimes she called her father Dad, or even Father, which surprised him. Who? he asked.

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

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.

A joke is necessary at this time.

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

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.

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.

You write from what you know but you write into what you don't know.

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.

I lived in a house in the East Bronx, a totally Jewish neighborhood on East 172nd Street. You didn't see Christians much, although one lived next door. We thought they were kind of a minority.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Near home I ran through our park, where I had aired my children on weekends and late-summer afternoons. I stopped at the northeast playground, where I met a dozen young mothers intelligently handling their little ones. In order to prepare them, meaning no harm, I said, In fifteen years, you girls will be like me, wrong in everything

The younger people with the ache of youth were eating all the cheese.

I write for the still, small possibility of justice.

The only thing you should have to do is find work you love to do. And I can't imagine living without having loved a person. A man, in my case. It could be a woman, but whatever. I think, what I always tell kids when they get out of class and ask, 'What should I do now?' I always say, 'Keep a low overhead. You're not going to make a lot of money.' And the next thing I say: 'Don't live with a person who doesn't respect your work.' That's the most important thing - that's more important than the money thing. I think those two things are very valuable pieces of information.

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.

The men don't like their wives so much. They only get married if it's a good idea." Faith

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.

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

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.

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

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

Write what will stop your breath if you don't write.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them.
The librarian said $32 even and you've owed it for eighteen years. I didn't deny anything. Because I don't understand how time passes. I have had those books. I have often thought of them. The library is only two blocks away.

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

We are in the hands of men whose power and wealth have separated them from the reality of daily life and from the imagination. We are right to be afraid.

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.

Let her live in the air,' said Peter. 'I bet you do. Let her love her body.'
'Let her,' said Anna sadly.

Oh no," she says. Soft because I am the older one, but very strong. (I've noticed it. All of a sudden they look at you, and then it comes to them, young people, they are bound to outlast you, so they temper up their icy steel and stare into about an inch away from you a lot. Have you noticed it?) At

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

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.

Poets take themselves very seriously.

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.

I finally understood that I didn't lack pen and paper but my own
memorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, called
rote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking,
a great human gift disowned.

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.

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.

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.

... 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.

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

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.