Grace Paley Quotes

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

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

- 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

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

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

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

- Grace Paley

'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.

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

- Grace Paley

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

- Grace Paley

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

- Grace Paley

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

- 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

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.

- Grace Paley

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

- Grace Paley

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

Poets take themselves very seriously.

- 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

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

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

- 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

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

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

- Grace Paley

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

- Grace Paley