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Grace Paley
134 quotes
“Every day in our neighborhood there were whole apartments, beds, bureaus, kitchen tables out on the street. We understood that this was because of capitalism, which didn't care that working people had no work and no money for rent.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Injustice" (1995)
“We made for him a great dinner of honor. At this dinner I said to him, for the last time, I thought, "Goodbye, dear friend, topic of my life, now we part." And to myself I said further: Finished. This is your lonesome bed. A lady what they call fat and fifty. You made it personally. From this lonesome bed you will finally fall to a bed not so lonesome, only crowded with a million bones.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Goodbye and Good Luck" (1959)
“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 (1922–2007) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Pale Pink Roast" (1959)
“Like a good and happy man increasing his virtue, he kissed her. She did not move away from him. She remained in the embrace of his right arm, her face nuzzling his shoulder, her eyes closed. He tipped her chin to look and measure opportunity. She could not open her eyes. Honorably he searched, but on her face he met no quarrel.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Pale Pink Roast" (1959)
“In no time at all his cheerful face appeared at the door of the spring dusk. In the street among peaceable strangers he did a handstand. Then easy and impervious, in full control, he cartwheeled eastward into the source of night.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Pale Pink Roast" (1959)
“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 (1922–2007) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Loudest Voice" (1959)
“I brought up lonesomeness again, and not being understood at all except by some women everybody hated.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Loudest Voice" (1959)
“I am ambitious, but it's a long-range thing with me. I have my confidential sights on a star, but there's half a lifetime to get to it. Meanwhile I keep my eyes open and am well dressed.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Contest" (1959)
“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 (1922–2007) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Contest" (1959)
“With a few grasping, kind words and a modern gimmick, she hoped to breathe eternity into a mortal matter, love.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Contest" (1959)
“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 (1922–2007) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Interest in Life" (1959)
“I was happy, but I am now in possession of knowledge that this is wrong. Happiness isn't so bad for a woman. She gets fatter, she gets older, she could lie down, nuzzling a regiment of men and little kids, she could just die of the pleasure. But men are different, they have to own money, or they have to be famous, or everybody on the block has too look up to them from the cellar stairs.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Interest in Life" (1959)
“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 (1922–2007) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Interest in Life" (1959)
“He settles in the kitchen because the children are asleep all over the rest of the house. I unknot his tie and offer him a cold sandwich. He raps my backside, paying attention to the bounce. I walk around him as though he were a Maypole, kissing as I go.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Interest in Life" (1959)
“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 (1922–2007) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Irrevocable Diameter" (1959)
“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 (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I need to stay as ignorant in the art of teaching as I want them to remain in the art of literature. The assignments I give are usually assignments I've given myself, problems that have defeated me, investigations I'm still pursuing.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Literature has something to do with language. There's probably a natural grammar at the tip of your tongue. You may not believe it, but if you say what's on your mind in the language that comes to you from your parents and your street and friends, you'll probably say something beautiful. Still, if you weren't a tough, recalcitrant kid, that language may have been destroyed by the tongues of school-teachers who were ashamed of interesting homes, inflection, and language and left them all for correct usage.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A first assignment: to be repeated whenever necessary, by me or the class. Write a story, a first-person narrative in the voice of someone with whom you're in conflict. Someone who disturbs you, worries you, someone you don't understand. Use a situation you don't understand.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No personal journals, please, for about a year. Why? Boring to me. When you find only yourself interesting, you're boring. When I find only myself interesting, I'm a conceited bore. When I'm interested in you, I'm interesting.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Stay open and ignorant.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Don’t go through life without reading the autobiographies of Emma Goldman, Prince Kropotkin, Malcolm X”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Two good books to read: A Life Full of Holes, Charhadi/I Work Like a Gardener, Joan Miró”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People like myself who must begin again and again in order to get anywhere at all.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She remembered that he was a person who had killed.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That was Janice, a political woman, conscious of power structure and power itself.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Plot, the absolute line between two points which I've always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Conversation with My Father" (1972)
“Jack asked me, Isn't it a terrible thing to grow up in the shadow of another person's sorrow?”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She was trying to make him feel guilty. Where were his balls? I will never respond to that question. Asked in a worried way again and again, it may become responsible for the destruction of the entire world. I gave it two minutes of silence.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A great deal has been written about that hostility at Waterloo, as though a country that refuses to pass something as simple as the Equal Rights Amendment would not have pockets of vicious misogyny, as though a nation with tens of thousands of nuclear bombs, Army bases, weapons factories in the midst of unemployment would not be able to raise a furious patriarchal horde.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“we asked: wouldn't it have been wonderful if hundreds, thousands of Germans had sat down before gates of the Krupp gas-oven plants and troubled the contented hearts and minds of the good German people?”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The woman on the other phone is young and in tears. She's saying, "Mom. Ma, please, it's my world they're gonna blow up." Then some silence. Then: "Ma, please, I have to do it. It's not terrible to get arrested. I'm all right, Ma, please listen, you got married and had us and everything and a house, but they still kept making nuclear bombs." More tears. "Listen, listen please, Ma." I wanted to take the phone from her and say, "Ma, don't worry, your kid's okay. She's great. Don't you see she's one of the young women who will save my granddaughter's life?”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The elderly woman's husband said, What is in his mind? He thinks because he was once a poor boy in a poor country and he became very rich with a beautiful wife, he thinks he can bend steel with his teeth.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[He] had invented a pinball machine. When we saw it, we said, George! This is not a pinball machine alone. This is the poem of a pinball machine, the essence made delicately concrete, and so forth.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thank God for the head. The head is the only place you got to be young when the usual place gets used up.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Wild] with a dream of wildness.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is this crap, Mother, this life is short and terrible. What is this metaphysical shit, what is this disease you intelligentsia are always talking about. First we said: Intelligentsia! Us? Oh, the way words lie down under decades, then the Union of Restless Diggers out of sheer insomnia pulls them up: daggers for the young but to us they look like flowers of nostalgia that grew in our mother’s foreign garden. What did my mother say? Darling, you should have come to Town Hall last night, the whole intelligentsia was there. My uncle, strictly: the intelligentsia will never permit it.!”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have to say that war is man-made. It's made by men. It's their thing, it's their world, and they're terribly injured in it. They suffer terribly in it, but it's made by men. How do they come to live this way?”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I came to think as a writer, it was because I had begun to live among women.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“that, I think, is really where lots of literature comes from. It really comes, not from knowing so much, but from not knowing. It comes from what you're curious about. It comes from what obsesses you. It comes from what you want to know.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“writers who are young or maybe just young in writing. To tell them that no matter what you feel about what you're doing, if that is really what you're looking for, if that is really what you're trying to understand, if that is really what you're stupid about, if that's what you're dumb about and you're trying to understand it, stay with it, no matter what, and you'll at least live your own truth or be hung for it.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“one of the things that art is about, for me, is justice. Now, that isn't a matter of opinion, really. That isn't to say, "I'm going to show these people right or wrong" or whatever. But what art is about-and this is what justice is about, although you'll have your own interpretations-is the illumination of what isn't known, the lighting up of what is under a rock, of what has been hidden. And I think people feel like that who are beginning to write.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For happiness, she also required work to do in this world and bread on the table.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By in love she meant the acuteness of the heart at the sudden sight of a particular person or the way over a couple of years of interested friendship one is suddenly stunned by the lungs' longing for more and more breath in the presence of that friend”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source