Grace Paley quotes - page 2

[Wild] with a dream of wildness. (Grace Paley)
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Grace Paley
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Grace Paley
[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.”. View quote
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. View quote
Grace Paley
Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world. View quote
Grace Paley
Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life. (Grace Paley)
All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar. View quote
Grace Paley
I often see through things right to the apparition itself. View quote
Grace Paley
I see women as oppressed, but I don't see them as victims; I see them rising all the time. I see them as very strong. View quote
Grace Paley
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. View quote
Grace Paley
Most of the Women's Libbers I knew really didn't want to have a piece of the men's pie. They thought that pie was kind of poisonous, toxic, really full of weapons, poison gases, all kinds of mean junk we didn't even want a slice of. View quote
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. View quote
Grace Paley
The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life. View quote
Grace Paley
I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty. View quote
Grace Paley
I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses. View quote
Grace Paley
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)
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.! View quote
Grace Paley
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. View quote
Grace Paley
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. View quote
Grace Paley
Two good books to read: A Life Full of Holes, Charhadi/I Work Like a Gardener, Joan Miró. View quote
Grace Paley