Grace Paley - Language Quotes

4 Sourced Quotes

View all Grace Paley Quotes

Don't you wish you could rise powerfully above your time and name? I'm sure we all try, but here we are, always slipping and falling down into them, speaking their narrow language, though the subject, which is how to save the world—and quickly—is immense.

Grace Paley

My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.

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

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