Grace Paley Quotes & Sayings

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. — Grace Paley

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

Poets take themselves very seriously. — Grace Paley

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

I drank a little California Mountain Red at home and thought
why not
wherever you turn someone is shouting give me liberty of I give you death. Perfectly sensible, thing-owning, Church-fearing neighbours flop their hands over their ears at the sound of a siren to keep fallout from taking hold of their internal organs. You have to be cockeyed to love, and blind in order to look out the window at your own ice-cold street. — Grace Paley

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

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. — Grace Paley

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

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

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. — Grace Paley

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. — Grace Paley

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. — Grace Paley

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

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. — Grace Paley

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. — Grace Paley

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

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

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 — Grace Paley

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. — Grace Paley

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. — Grace Paley

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. — Grace Paley

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 — Grace Paley

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. — Grace Paley

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. — Grace Paley

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. — Grace Paley

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

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

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

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. — Grace Paley

My daughter has pointed out that there were not enough lovejobs to go around in this new world. In any event, I probably learned tolerance, maybe even literary affection for the person in the wrong historical moment, living such long, never to be mediate wars with other sufferers. — Grace Paley

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

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. — Grace Paley

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

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. — Grace Paley

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

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

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

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. — Grace Paley

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. — Grace Paley

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

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. — Grace Paley

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. — Grace Paley

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. — Grace Paley

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. — Grace Paley

When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write stories in my mid-thirties. My kids were still little, and they were in school and day care, and I had begun to think a lot about wanting to tell some stories and not being able to do it in poetry. — Grace Paley

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

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. — Grace Paley

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

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

I wanted a sailboat, he said. But you didn't want anything. Don't be bitter, I said. It's never too late. No, he said with a great deal of bitterness. I may get a sailboat. As a matter of fact I have money down on an eighteen-foot two-rigger. I'm doing well this year and can look forward to better. But as for you, it's too late. You'll always want nothing. He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber's snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, halfway to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment. What I mean is, I sat down on the library steps and he went away. I looked through The House of Mirth, but lost interest. I felt extremely accused. Now, it's true, I'm short of requests and absolute requirements. But I do want something. I want, for instance, to be a different person. — Grace Paley

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

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. — Grace Paley

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

... 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

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

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

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. — Grace Paley

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Grace Paley

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. — Grace Paley

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. — Grace Paley

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

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. — Grace Paley

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

Happy!" He leaned over the rail and tried to hold her eyes. But that is hard to do, for eyes are born dodgers and know a whole circumference of ways out of a bad spot.

"Faith in the Afternoon — Grace Paley

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

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

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

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. — Grace Paley

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

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. — Grace Paley

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

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. — Grace Paley

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

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. — Grace Paley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I unknot his tie and offer him a cold sandwich. He raps my backside, paying attention to the bounce. I walk around him as though he were a Maypole, kissing as I go.
"I lost my cuff link, goddamnit" he says, and drops to the floor to look for it. I go down too on my knees, but I know he never had a cuff link in his life. Still I would do a lot for him.
"Got you off you feet that time," he says, laughing. "Oh yes, I did." And before I can even make myself half comfortable on that polka-dotted linoleum, he got onto me right where we were, and the truth is, we were so happy, we forgot the precautions. — Grace Paley

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. — Grace Paley

Air was filtering out of my two collapsing lungs. Water rose, bubbling to enter, and I would have died of instantaneous pneumonia - something I have never heard of - if my hand had not got hold of a glass ashtray and, entirely apart from my personal decision, flung it. — Grace Paley

A joke is necessary at this time. — Grace Paley

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

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

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

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

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

The abortion isn't what they(conservative pro-life men of 1940s) are thinking
about; they're really thinking about sex. They're really thinking
about love and reducing it to its most mechanical aspects - that is to
say, the mechanical fact of intercourse as a specific act to make
children in this world, and thinking of its use in any other way as
wrong and wicked. They are determined to reduce women's normal sexual
responses, to end them, really, when we've just had a couple of
decades of admitting them. — Grace Paley

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

Remembering is organized for significance (not usefulness) — Grace Paley

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

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. — Grace Paley