Top 109 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

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

'The Immigrant Story,' which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn't think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That's the only way you get it sometimes.

I see women as oppressed, but I don't see them as victims; I see them rising all the time. I see them as very strong.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

If you want to do things, do things.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I often see through things right to the apparition itself.

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

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.

Poets take themselves very seriously.

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.

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

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

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.

…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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

I write for the still, small possibility of justice.

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

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.

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.

Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world. That's why it almost always has to be on the side of the underdog.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The only recognizable feature of hope is action.

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

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.

Every time you finish something ... you figure you've finally learned to write, right? Then you start something else and it turns out you haven't. You have learned how to write that story, or that book, but you haven't learned how to write the next one.

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.

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

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.

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

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.