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

The look of being too deliberately dressed, with everything cautiously matching, always bores me. — Babe Paley

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

In all things preserve integrity; and the consciousness of your own uprightness will alleviate the toil of business, soften the hardness of ill-success and disappointments, and give you a humble confidence before God, when the ingratitude of people, or the iniquity of the times may rob you of other rewards. — Babe Paley

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

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

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

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

Television, I would say,
isn't an advertising medium.
It's a selling medium. — William S. Paley

I have seldom known a person who deserted the truth in trifles and then could be trusted in matters of importance. — Babe 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 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

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. — 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

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

Let's say you're walking around and you find a watch on the ground. As you examine it, you marvel at the intricately complex interweaving of its parts, a means to an end. Surely you wouldn't think this marvel would have come about by itself. The watch must have a maker. Just as the watch has such complex means to an end, so does nature to a much greater extent. Just look at the complexity of the human eye. Thus we must conclude that nature has a maker too. — William 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

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 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

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

I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them. — Nell Freudenberger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So Paley was right in saying not just that Design was a wonderful thing to explain, but also that Design took Intelligence. All he missed - and Darwin provided - was the idea that this Intelligence could be broken into bits so tiny and stupid that they didn't count as intelligence at all, and then distributed through space and time in a gigantic, connected network of algorithmic process. — Daniel C. Dennett

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. — Grace Paley

(For the uninitiated, "ectoplasm" is a ghostly kind of stuff that writers like Dennett are constantly accusing critics of materialism of believing in. It plays the same sort of straw-man role in his writings on the mind that Paley does in Dawkins's writings on religion.) — Edward Feser

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

Monumental is not a matter of size. — Albert Paley

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

A joke is necessary at this time. — Grace Paley

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

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

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

(Interested in being a better writer? Go buy yourself a copy of The Collected Stories by Grace Paley.) The — Ann Patchett

Party of the Century by Deborah Davis, about Truman Capote's famous Black and White Ball. Capote by Gerald Clarke. Truman Capote by George Plimpton. Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. by Sam Wasson. Slim, the memoir of Slim Keith. And The Sisters by David Grafton, about Babe Paley and her sisters. — Melanie Benjamin

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

What is public history but a register of the successes and disappointments, the vices, the follies and the quarrels of those who engage in contention for power. — William S. Paley

Who can refute a sneer? — William 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

Only the most reckless, self-indulgent of men would deny Aquinas's conclusion, God. Albeit a concealed one, the presence of an overmind is self-evident and necessary, yet in the same breath, only the most negligent and asinine would terminate the enquiry at such a premature rung, believing as the theologian William Paley believed that the earthly design is inherently beneficial. — John Zande

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

Babe Paley simply never made an empty gesture, and here she was, assembling a parade of them. But her feet, her hands, her mind, her heart, were all restless. Truman. — Melanie Benjamin

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

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

White lies always introduce others of a darker complexion. — William S. 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

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

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

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 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 checked out the two Edith Wharton books I had just returned because I'd read them so long ago and they are more apropos now than ever. They were The House of Mirth and The Children, which is about how life in the United States in New York changed in twenty-seven years fifty years ago.
("Wants") — Grace Paley

Nowadays theologians aren't quite so straightforward as Paley. They don't point to complex living mechanisms and say that they are self-evidently designed by a creator, just like a watch. But there is a tendency to point to them and say 'It is impossible to believe' that such complexity, or such perfection, could have evolved by natural selection. Whenever I read such a remark, I always feel like writing 'Speak for yourself' in the margin. — Richard Dawkins

Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice. — Padgett Powell

It is doubtful whether mankind are most indebted to those who like Bacon and Butler dig the gold from the mine of literature, or to those who, like Paley, purify it, stamp it, fix its real value, and give it currency and utility — Charles Caleb Colton

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

He appreciated it, to a point. He also had no intention of having a second marriage like his first, a marriage in which the wife taught the husband, and didn't care who knew it; in fact, took pains to let others see how much she had taught him, how much more she knew about art and politics and all the rest. That had been Dorothy Hearst Paley's fatal flaw, one she recognized too late. Babe — Melanie Benjamin

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

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

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

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

The last thing I would accuse a cat of is innocence. — Edward Graham Paley

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

Andy Paley got us a show opening for his band at an outdoor show at Simmon's College, on a Friday. — Jonathan Richman

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

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

Bill Paley is not only the greatest boss I ever had, but he's the most brilliant, honest and warm human being I've ever met. And I'll say that to his face - even if it costs me my job. — Jack Benny

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

There's a certain amount of disorder that has to be reorganized. — William Paley

At first when I realized I was a romantic, I was sort of shocked and shamed. But it is true ... that the material I work most with is emotion. — Albert 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

You are an idealist, which means that you are destined to be disappointed, and perhaps even wounded. You seek a gospel of benevolence and miracle, which leaves no room for the sorrows of existence. You are like William Paley, arguing that the perfection of every design in the universe is proof of God's love for us. — Elizabeth Gilbert

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

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