Grace Paley Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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I often see through things right to the apparition itself.

Grace Paley
Women should stick together. Didn't you learn anything yet?

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

Grace Paley
You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.

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

Grace Paley
It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.

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

Grace Paley
I'm not against friendliness, she said, I'm not even against Americans.

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

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

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

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

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

Grace Paley
The whole point is to put yourself into other lives, other heads—writers have always done that.

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

Grace Paley
I thank you, Papa, for your kindness. It is true about me to this day. I am foolish but I am not a fool.

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
Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.

Grace Paley
With a few grasping, kind words and a modern gimmick, she hoped to breathe eternity into a mortal matter, love.

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
Thank God for the head. Inside the head is the only place you got to be young when the usual place gets used up.

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 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
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
Well, a wish, some wish, Ruth said. Well, I wished that this world wouldn't end. This world, this world, Ruth said softly.

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
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
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
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
He had a habit... of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber's snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, halfway to my heart.

Grace Paley