Grace Paley Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
-
“Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.”
-- Grace PaleySource : Grace Paley (2014). “The Collected Stories”, p.334, Macmillan
-
“I've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.”
-- Grace Paley -
“Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.”
-- 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 -
-
“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 -
“All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.”
-- 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 -
“The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.”
-- Grace Paley -
-
“The only recognizable feature of hope is action.”
-- Grace Paley -
“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 -
“Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.”
-- Grace PaleySource : Grace Paley, Vera B. Williams (1991). “Long Walks and Intimate Talks”, p.9, Feminist Press at CUNY
-
-
“We write about what we don't know about what we know....”
-- Grace Paley -
“In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.”
-- 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 -
“You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.”
-- Grace PaleySource : Grace Paley (2014). “The Collected Stories”, p.205, Macmillan
-
-
“For me, the meaning of life is the next generation.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.”
-- Grace Paley -
-
“Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.”
-- Grace Paley -
“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 -
“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 -
-
“Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.”
-- Grace Paley -
“I write for the still, small possibility of justice.”
-- Grace Paley -
“No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.”
-- Grace Paley -
“You come to doing what you do by not being able to do something.”
-- Grace Paley -
-
“It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.”
-- 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
You may also like:
-
Allan Gurganus
Novelist -
Amy Hempel
Writer -
Ann Beattie
Writer -
Bernard Malamud
Author -
Cynthia Ozick
Writer -
Donald Barthelme
Author -
James Joyce
Novelist -
John Cheever
Novelist -
Lorrie Moore
Writer -
Lydia Davis
Writer -
Raymond Carver
Writer -
Rita Dove
Poet -
Russell Banks
Writer -
Saul Bellow
Writer -
Stuart Dybek
Writer -
Tillie Olsen
Writer -
Vladimir Nabokov
Novelist -
William H. Gass
Novelist -
Flannery O'Connor
Writer -
Luisa Valenzuela
Novelist