Grace Paley famous quotes

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

#Courage #World #Rage

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

#Pages #Seven #Novel

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

#Writing

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.
-- Grace Paley

#Kids #Men #Thinking

The best training is to read and write, no matter what. Don't live with a lover or roommate who doesn't respect your work. Don't lie, buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don't write.
-- Grace Paley

#Fun #Lying #Writing

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

#Good Life #Survival #Peculiar

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.
-- Grace Paley

#Screw Ups #Done #Screws

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

#Careers #Normal #Normal Life

The only recognizable feature of hope is action.
-- Grace Paley

#Action

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

Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.
-- Grace Paley

#World #Sometimes #Forget

If you want to do things, do things.
-- Grace Paley

#Want

We write about what we don't know about what we know....
-- Grace Paley

#Writing

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

#Long #Rewards #Life Is

Old age is another country, a place of strangeness, sometimes, and dislocation. There's a lot to be done in this country, and a great deal of pleasure there. There are friends, some of whom are sick and needful of you, as you will be of them someday. The world itself is very beautiful. It's a place where you have a lot to do. But you have to do it knowing that sometimes you will be afraid of this new country.
-- Grace Paley

#Beautiful #Country #Knowing

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

#Long #Mind

For me, the meaning of life is the next generation.
-- Grace Paley

#Meaning Of Life #Generations #Next

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

#Justice #Underdog #Fiction

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

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

#Education #Philosophy #Believe

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

#Doe #Facts #Hindsight

Art's too long and life's too short.
-- Grace Paley

#Art #Long #Too Short

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.
-- Grace Paley

#Blood #People #Stories

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.
-- Grace Paley

#War #Wind #Oil

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

#Beach #Land #Wave

I write for the still, small possibility of justice.
-- Grace Paley

#Writing #Justice #Possibility

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

#Jobs #Children #Metaphor

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

#Able

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

#Young #Die Young #Terrible

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

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

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.
-- Grace Paley

#Book #Writing #Stories

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.
-- Grace Paley

#Lying #Writing #Dope

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

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

#Book #Reality #Heartbreaking

Paul Goodman was not ahead of his time but IN his time.
-- Grace Paley

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

#Real #Destiny #Deserve

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.
-- Grace Paley

#Summer #Running #Sweet

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.
-- Grace Paley

#Husband #Years #Library

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

#Sometimes

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

#Writing #Needs

…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.
-- Grace Paley

#Beautiful #Lying #Character

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.
-- Grace Paley

#Real #Writing #Vocabulary

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

#Knowing #Long

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

#Optimistic #Views #World

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

#Together #Sticks #Should

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

I often see through things right to the apparition itself.
-- Grace Paley

#Apparitions

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.
-- Grace Paley

#Writing #Twenties #Add

Art is too long, and life is too short,
-- Grace Paley

#Art #Life Is Too Short #Long

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

#Writing #Sound #Plot

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

#Night #Thinking #Translate

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

#Lying #Stories

Write from what you know into what you don't know.
-- Grace Paley

#Writing #Crafts

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

#Believe #Ideas #Fads

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

#Mind #Students #Fantasy