Grace Paley Quotes

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.

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

I write for the still, small possibility of justice.

…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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Art is too long, and life is too short.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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