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Grace Paley

134 quotes

“everywhere vast public suffering rose in reeling waves from the round earth's nation-states-hung in the satellite-watched air and settled in no time at all into TV sets and newsrooms. It was all there. Look up and the news of halfway round the planet is falling on us all.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“sometimes walking with a friend I forget the world.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People say the Vietnamese won the war. They did not win the war, the U.S. won the war, just by leaving and starving them to death. You don’t say somebody won the war in a medieval town which is under constant siege. Until the U.S. is certain that the Vietnamese lost the war, until they’re absolutely certain that their condition is totally hopeless, we’re not gonna help them. (2000)”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’d never known pacifists before. My parents were very peaceful people and socialists, and they were always against all wars, but pacifism was not a Russian socialist idea. Somebody invited (peace and civil rights activist and WRL staffer) Bayard Rustin to talk, and Mary Gandall and I listened to him with our mouths open. We were both so impressed—it was like the good news, as they say about Jesus. We were getting very good news about how to think about the world. (2000)”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“probably the education in nonviolent direct action couldn’t have been learned without a war. It had to take a war for people to learn that things could be defied and resisted. I think that was a very important legacy of the peace movement. (2000)”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“people think that they have to use their brains to figure out how best to retaliate or how best to make war. And it brings us to total hopelessness. (2001)”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“even when my kids were smaller, you had three — people like me had three things to do. They had the family to take care of and to worry about. And they had our political lives to lead — I mean, I should say the business of the war or whatever it was. And then we also had our work, our life work, which for me was literature, which I — which was my great good luck that I had that, because it enabled me to think in another way than a lot of other people. (2003)”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“when people say, “What can poets do?” I often say, “Just what any other working group could do to get anything accomplished, and that is to organize.” (2003)”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That’s the thing about writing. You can bring a lot of stuff together. (2003)”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that any life that’s interesting, lived, has a lot of pulls in it.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For me, somehow, the short story is very close to the poem in feeling and not so close in feeling to the novel, although it’s about the same people that a novel would be about.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“you can only teach learners. You can’t teach any subject to anybody who isn’t there to want to know.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I write about things I don’t know all that well just to try and understand them. The act of writing is an investigative, learning act.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think all art, all these stories that people write, happen when two amazing facts come together in some way, or two amazing events, or two amazing winds, or whatever it is, come and the surprise of this meeting is the story.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“children’s writing is so often so beautiful, because it’s so close to their own true tongues. On the other hand, it’s very boring because they have no experience in life.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even as a kid, it wasn’t to big stories of heroism that I listened but to the everyday people on my block more than anything else. Since I thought of my father and mother as somewhat heroic in their early years, what interested me tremendously was how this whole other world of people living every day, how they lived their lives. I think most people are heroic to a degree, they’re heroic in caring for the lives of the people around them and not dumping each other or dumping on each other.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think the women’s movement is wonderful, a great thing. I hate to see some of the mean struggles within it, but I don’t see how it could exist without it. Everybody should try to be as honorable and truthful and fierce as they can be.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“if you don’t think history, you’re not thinking. You’re just not thinking if you cannot see a generation back. And if you do not think about the circumstances in their lives, then you don’t know what you’re thinking about. There’s no truth in the present moment. Now simply doesn’t exist without then at all.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You know in my lifetime, Jews have been very close to Blacks, really have had very close relations, and I just happen to be reading this book When and Where I Enter (by Paula Giddings).”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you I live long enough you really become patient. People improve. If they're already wonderful, they become slowly more wonderful.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can't talk about anything without bringing in the world. It's out there.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That word identity has been hard for many women who live secular lives and maybe harder for religious women and also feminists. But the women's movement has made a big difference. I don't know who it hasn't helped in this world. It's given a lot of Jewish women courage to stay Jewish and fight.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“we had our normal family life—struggles and hard times. That takes up a lot of time, hard times. Uses up whole days.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“it was kind of exhausting running after two babies. Still, looking back I see the pleasure of it. That’s when I began to know women very well—as co-workers, really...If I hadn’t spent that time in the playground, I wouldn’t have written a lot of those stories.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Writers often write about what they want to read or haven’t seen written.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“there’s always that first storytelling impulse: I want to tell you something...”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A lot of them (my stories) begin with a sentence—they all begin with language...Very often one sentence is absolutely resonant...The sound of the story comes first.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“what’s a writer for? The whole point is to put yourself into other lives, other heads—writers have always done that. If you screw up, so someone will tell you, that’s all. I think men can write about women and women can write about men. The whole point is to know the facts. Men have so often written about women without knowing the reality of their lives, and worse, without being interested in that daily reality.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(Are there any men you think write particularly well about women?) I liked Norman Rush’s last book, Mating. The main character is a very smart woman, very intellectual, very interesting, and very unlike many of the women many women write about.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I read poetry all the time. Probably the poets everybody read then. Very catholic taste. I even loved Eliot then whom I later grew not to love. I knew lots of poems by memory and walked around mumbling them. Yeats, Rilke, Keats, Coleridge. I liked Milton a lot, for some reason. And then there were the Oscar Williams anthologies of 1942 and 1943 with those pictures of the beautiful young poets.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Russian is very dear to me because it’s a family language, but I am Jewish-Russian, which is a little different from Russian-Russian. My family ran away in 1905 from the Russian-Russians.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’ve been surrounded by music for most of my life. Always classical. But I think the most powerful sounds are those voices, those childhood voices. The tune of those voices. Other languages, Russian and Yiddish, coming up smack against the English. I think you hear that a lot in American literature.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I will say I knew I wanted to write about women and children, but I put it off for a couple of years because I thought, People will think this is trivial, nothing. Then I thought, It’s what I have to write. It’s what I want to read. And I don’t see it out there. Meanwhile, the women’s movement had begun to gather force. It needed to become the second wave. It turned out that we were some of the drops in the wave. Tillie Olsen was more like a cupful.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There’s hardly a woman writer who doesn’t receive some kind of support from the women’s movement. We’re very lucky to be living and writing now.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the outside world will trivialize you for almost anything if it wants to. You may as well be who you are.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In 1959 it was absolutely insane for Ken McCormick to say, yes, he was going to publish a book of short stories. Now everybody in the writing world is reading and writing short stories.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“a lot more women are writing. A lot of people who wouldn’t have written are writing. When a couple of black women speak, the throats of many are opened. Somehow or other they give courage and sound to their sisters.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can’t write without a lot of pressure. Sometimes the pressure comes from anger, which then changes into a pressure to write...The pressure from anger is an energy that can be violent or useful or useless. Also the pressure doesn’t have to be anger. It could be love. One could be overcome with feelings of lifetime love or justice.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I hate the American expectation of violence. I’m not going to play into any of that. When I must write about violence, I will, but I’ll do it straight, not add and add because the level is higher every year.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“art comes from constant mental harassment.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s a different life (being a parent). Another creature is really dependent on you. I think it’s good for a writer, though. I know some people say women writers should not have children. Of course, it was worse for them back then. Years ago just to do the kids’ wash could take the whole day, so if you were poor it was impossible to write. If you were rich, you could hire a maid; it was possible if you were George Sand. But even now we need help. My kids were in day care from the time they were three years old.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I always say that racism is like pneumonia and anti-Semitism is like the common cold—everybody has it.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The best training is to read and write, no matter what. Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work. Don’t lie, buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in. 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. (1978 interview)”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't see television the way most people do. I see it as a destroyer of concentration rather than of language. There's dead language everywhere. We're cut off from the truth of our tongues. (1980)”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People's imagination has been changed a lot by television. (1980)”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“all the arts feed each other (1980)”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(Why didn't you stick with poetry?) GP: I write a lot of poetry. I just never get good. Poetry is too literary a thing which comes from my love of literature rather than from my love of people, my feeling for people. (1980)”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Concentration is really a problem for me. To seize something. But when I really have a story I'm working on, I can work on it sitting in a train, going to Washington, any place, anywhere. It's totally absorbing. (1980)”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think a lot of what influences a writer is what you hear in the street, the language you hear, the way people talk, the way, the rhythms, the song, the language of your childhood. (1980)”
Grace Paley (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source