Grace Paley Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
I often see through things right to the apparition itself.

Grace Paley
People do want to be young and beautiful. When they meet in the street, male or female, if they're getting older they look at each other's face a little ashamed. It's clear they want to say, Excuse me, I didn't mean to draw attention to mortality and gravity all at once. I didn't want to remind you, my dear friend, of our coming eviction, first from liveliness, then from life. To which, most of the time, the friend's eyes will courteously reply, My dear, it's nothing at all. I hardly noticed.

Grace Paley
I sighed in and I groaned out, so as to melt a certain pain around my heart. A steel ring like arthritis, at my age.

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
No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.

Grace Paley
It's hard to stand behind a people and culture in revolutionary transition when you are constantly worried about their irreplaceable and breakable artifacts.

Grace Paley
Peter sighed. He turned the palms of his hands up as though to guess at rain. Anna knew him, theme and choreography. The sunshiny spring afternoon seeped through his fingers. He looked up at the witnessing heavens to keep what he could. He dropped his arms and let the rest go.

Grace Paley
No, George said, you don't understand. The pinball machine—any pinball machine you play in any penny arcade—is so remarkable, so fine, so shrewdly threaded. It is already beautiful in necessity and sufficiency of wire, connection, possibility.

Grace Paley
I brought up lonesomeness again, and not being understood at all except by some women everybody hated.

Grace Paley
It is still hard to believe that a man who sends out the Ten Commandments every year for a Christmas card can be so easy buttoning and unbuttoning.

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

Grace Paley
The organization of his ideas was all wrong; I was drawn to the memory of myself — a mere stripling of a girl — the day I learned that the shortest distance between any two points was a great circle.

Grace Paley
I thought of praying for divine guidance in line with the great spiritual renaissance of our time. But I am all thumbs in that kind of deciduous conversation. I asked myself, did I, as God's creature under the stars, have the right to evade an event, a factual occurrence, to parry an experience or even a small peradventure.

Grace Paley
My last girl was Jewish, which is often a warm kind of girl, concerned about food intake and employability. They don't like you to work too hard, I understand, until you're hooked and then, you bastard, sweat!

Grace Paley
Despite my geographical love of mankind, I would be attacked by local fears.

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

Grace Paley
But I do like this language — wheat and chaff — with its widening pool of foreign genes, and since I never have had any occasion to say comestible, it was pleasurable to think it.

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
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
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
Well, by now you must know yourself, honey, whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.

Grace Paley
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.

Grace 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
There's always that first storytelling impulse: I want to tell you something.

Grace Paley
Plot is nothing; plot is simply time, a timeline. All our stories have timelines. One thing happens, then another thing happens.

Grace Paley
Again, you think you're unique in some way but you really never are: you read what people your age are reading.

Grace Paley
Writers are lucky because when they're angry, the anger—by habit almost—I wouldn't say transcends but becomes an acute pressure to write, to tell.

Grace Paley