Grace Paley Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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.

…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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

If you want to do things, do things.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.