Grace Paley Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 write for the still, small possibility of justice.

The only recognizable feature of hope is action.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I often see through things right to the apparition itself.

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 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.

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

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

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

If you want to do things, do things.

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

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

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

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

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