Grace Paley Quotes

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

There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.

Grace Paley once described the male-female writer phenomenon to me by saying, “Women have always done men the favor of reading their work, but the men have not returned the favor.

The only recognizable feature of hope is action.

You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.

That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality.

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

Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.

The only thing you should have to do is find work you love to do. And I can't imagine living without having loved a person. A man, in my case. It could be a woman, but whatever. I think, what I always tell kids when they get out of class and ask, 'What should I do now?' I always say, 'Keep a low overhead. You're not going to make a lot of money.' And the next thing I say: 'Don't live with a person who doesn't respect your work.' That's the most important thing—that's more important than the money thing. I think those two things are very valuable pieces of information.

You write from what you know but you write into what you don't know.

We are in the hands of men whose power and wealth have separated them from the reality of daily life and from the imagination. We are right to be afraid.

There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.” —GRACE PALEY

The wrong word is like a lie jammed inside the story.

Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?

The younger people with the ache of youth were eating all the cheese.

To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.

…I go through a story for lies. I might discover the lie of trying to show off. Sometimes they’re lies of character. Sometimes they are lies of writing the most beautiful sentence in the world that has nothing to do with the story.

I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library. Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified. He said, What? What life? No life of mine.

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.

‏Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work.

it is possible with only a little extra anguish to live in this world at absolute [minimum?] loving brainy sexual energetic redeemed

Who cares?' said Judy, who didn't care.

Remembering is organized for significance (not usefulness)

Here I am in the garden laughing an old woman with heavy breasts and a nicely mapped face how did this happen well that's who I wanted to be at last a woman in the old style sitting stout thighs apart under a big skirt grandchild sliding on off my lap a pleasant summer perspiration that's my old man across the yard he's talking to the meter reader he's telling him the world's sad story how electricity is oil or uranium and so forth I tell my grandson run over to your grandpa ask him to sit beside me for a minute I am suddenly exhausted by my desire to kiss his sweet explaining lips.

Edie didn't budge. She leaned her chin on her knees and felt sad. She was a big reader too, but she liked THE BOBBSEY TWINS or HONEY BUNCH AT THE SEASHORE. She loved that nice family life. She tried to live it in the three rooms on the fourth floor. Sometimes she called her father Dad, or even Father, which surprised him. Who? he asked.

Near home I ran through our park, where I had aired my children on weekends and late-summer afternoons. I stopped at the northeast playground, where I met a dozen young mothers intelligently handling their little ones. In order to prepare them, meaning no harm, I said, In fifteen years, you girls will be like me, wrong in everything

Air was filtering out of my two collapsing lungs. Water rose, bubbling to enter, and I would have died of instantaneous pneumonia - something I have never heard of - if my hand had not got hold of a glass ashtray and, entirely apart from my personal decision, flung it.

He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years 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. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment. What I mean is, I sat down on the library steps and he went away.

People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes. I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a plot. But I can’t teach you how to have something to say. I would not begin to know how to teach another person how to have character, which was what Grace Paley did.

I drank a little California Mountain Red at home and thought--why not--wherever you turn someone is shouting give me liberty of I give you death. Perfectly sensible, thing-owning, Church-fearing neighbours flop their hands over their ears at the sound of a siren to keep fallout from taking hold of their internal organs. You have to be cockeyed to love, and blind in order to look out the window at your own ice-cold street.

At this very moment, the thumb of Ricardo's hovering shadow jabbed her in her left eye, revealing for all the world the shallowness of her water table. Rice could have been planted at that instant on the terraces of her flesh and sprouted in strength and beauty in the floods that overwhelmed her from that moment on through all the afternoon.

Paley said of her dreams for her grandchildren: "It would be a world without militarism and racism and greed – and where women don't have to fight for their place in the world.

(Interested in being a better writer? Go buy yourself a copy of The Collected Stories by Grace Paley.) The

I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them. The librarian said $32 even and you've owed it for eighteen years. I didn't deny anything. Because I don't understand how time passes. I have had those books. I have often thought of them. The library is only two blocks away.

the only one with an ear for prose who could follow his arguments about why Flannery O’Conner and Grace Paley were bolder, more inventive stylists than Bellow, Updike, or any other American man except perhaps Baldwin,

Well! I decided to bring those two books back to the library. Which proves that when a person or an event comes along to jolt or appraise me I CAN take some appropriate action, although I am better known for my hospitable remarks.

I finally understood that I didn’t lack pen and paper but my own memorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, called rote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking, a great human gift disowned.

Still, it is like a long hopeless homesickness my missing those young days. To me, they're like my own place that I have gone away from forever, and I have lived all the time since among great pleasures but in a foreign town. Well, O.K. Farewell, certain years.

I checked out the two Edith Wharton books I had just returned because I'd read them so long ago and they are more apropos now than ever. They were The House of Mirth and The Children, which is about how life in the United States in New York changed in twenty-seven years fifty years ago. ("Wants")

The abortion isn’t what they(conservative pro-life men of 1940s) are thinking about; they’re really thinking about sex. They’re really thinking about love and reducing it to its most mechanical aspects—that is to say, the mechanical fact of intercourse as a specific act to make children in this world, and thinking of its use in any other way as wrong and wicked. They are determined to reduce women’s normal sexual responses, to end them, really, when we’ve just had a couple of decades of admitting them.

La idea de que me iré de un mundo que está cada vez peor no me gusta, porque siempre pensé que era mi deber dejar el mundo mejor de lo que lo había encontrado. Si se tiene el hábito de ver cada día como una jornada completa, envejecer es interesante. Todos los días se conoce a una persona nueva, una puesta de sol nueva. Todos los días pasan cosas hermosas".

Whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.

My dear, no one knows the power of good sense. It hasn’t been built up or experimented with sufficiently.

Let her live in the air,' said Peter. 'I bet you do. Let her love her body.' 'Let her,' said Anna sadly.

She put her two hands over her ribs to hold her heart in place and also out of modesty to quiet its immodest thud.

The men don’t like their wives so much. They only get married if it’s a good idea.” Faith

... 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.

I wanted a sailboat, he said. But you didn’t want anything. Don’t be bitter, I said. It’s never too late. No, he said with a great deal of bitterness. I may get a sailboat. As a matter of fact I have money down on an eighteen-foot two-rigger. I’m doing well this year and can look forward to better. But as for you, it’s too late. You’ll always want nothing. He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years 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. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment. What I mean is, I sat down on the library steps and he went away. I looked through The House of Mirth, but lost interest. I felt extremely accused. Now, it’s true, I’m short of requests and absolute requirements. But I do want something. I want, for instance, to be a different person.

Las mujeres han comprado libros escritos por hombres desde siempre, y se dieron cuenta de que no eran acerca de ellas. Pero continuaron haciéndolo con gran interés porque era como leer acerca de un país extranjero. Los hombres nunca han devuelto la cortesía”.

By love, she probably meant she would die without being in love. 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, or nearly drowned to the knees by the salty spring that seems to beat for years on our vaginal shores. Not to omit all sorts of imaginings which assure great spiritual energy for months and, when luck follows truth, years.

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. “I lost my cuff link, goddamnit” he says, and drops to the floor to look for it. I go down too on my knees, but I know he never had a cuff link in his life. Still I would do a lot for him. “Got you off you feet that time,” he says, laughing. “Oh yes, I did.” And before I can even make myself half comfortable on that polka-dotted linoleum, he got onto me right where we were, and the truth is, we were so happy, we forgot the precautions.

Since I was a big reader, I might be able to accomplish something. I had no gift. That didn’t mean I must be a deprived person. Besides, why had the Enlightenment poured its seductive light all across the European continent right into the poor endangered households of Ukrainian Jews? Probably, my mother thought, so that a child, any child (even a tone-deaf one), could be given a chance despite genetic deficiency to become, in my mother’s embarrassed hopeful world, a whole person.

My daughter has pointed out that there were not enough lovejobs to go around in this new world. In any event, I probably learned tolerance, maybe even literary affection for the person in the wrong historical moment, living such long, never to be mediate wars with other sufferers.

Happy!" He leaned over the rail and tried to hold her eyes. But that is hard to do, for eyes are born dodgers and know a whole circumference of ways out of a bad spot. "Faith in the Afternoon

In a way he was lucky. He was a member of a generation that thought it was a good, even joyous, political idea to put its brains, energy, labor at the service of the people.

Near the end of her life, Grace Paley once remarked that the decades between fifty and eighty feel not like minutes, but seconds. I don't know yet if this is the case, but I do know this: the decades separating that young mother making her lists from the middle aged woman discovering them feel like the membrane of a giant floating bubble. A pinprick and I'm back there. But is she here? How can I tell her that her lists will not protect her?

Despite no education, Mrs. Finn always is more in charge of word meanings than I am. She is especially in charge of Good and Bad. 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.

And for the really bad memories, the ones that can’t be turned into an anecdote or funny story, the ones we carry around like poison, well, those are the ones that connect us most deeply with others. Those, when we have the courage to share them, are what make us human. In the words of Grace Paley, “Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.

I'd check out books by Ursula Le Guin, Grace Paley, and Carson McCullers. And then I'd hide the books from view when anyone walked by because I was afraid someone would ask me about them, like they might think I was showing off or trying to be someone that I wasn't. There were times I felt feral, like I hadn't gotten the proper training right when it mattered, and now I was lost.

Oh no,” she says. Soft because I am the older one, but very strong. (I’ve noticed it. All of a sudden they look at you, and then it comes to them, young people, they are bound to outlast you, so they temper up their icy steel and stare into about an inch away from you a lot. Have you noticed it?) At

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.

The whole meaning of my life, which was jammed until midnight with fifteen different jobs and places, was writing. It took me a long time to know that, but I know it now.

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, or nearly drowned to the knees by the salty spring that seems to beat for years on our vaginal shores. Not to omit all sorts of imaginings which assure great spiritual energy for months and, when luck follows truth, years.

retrospective smartness,

Responsibility It is the responsibility of society to let the poet be a poet It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman It is the responsibility of the poet to stand on street corners giving out poems and beautifully written leaflets also leaflets they can hardly bear to look at because of the screaming rhetoric It is the responsibility of the poet to be lazy   to hang out and prophesy It is the responsibility of the poet not to pay war taxes It is the responsibility of the poet to go in and out of ivory towers and two-room apartments on Avenue C and buckwheat fields and army camps It is the responsibility of the male poet to be a woman It is the responsibility of the female poet to be a woman It is the poet’s responsibility to speak truth to power as the Quakers say It is the poet’s responsibility to learn the truth from the powerless It is the responsibility of the poet to say many times: there is no freedom without justice and this means economic justice and love justice It is the responsibility of the poet to sing this in all the original and traditional tunes of singing and telling poems It is the responsibility of the poet to listen to gossip and pass it on in the way storytellers decant the story of life There is no freedom without fear and bravery   there is no freedom unless earth and air and water continue and children also continue It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman   to keep an eye on this world and cry out like Cassandra, but be listened to this time

Emshwiller’s like a wild mixture of Italo Calvino (intellectual games) and Grace Paley (perfect honesty) and Fay Weldon (outrageous wit) and Jorge Luis Borges (pure luminosity), but no—her voice is perfectly her own. She isn’t like anybody. She’s different.

Rosie, ah Rosie," dedi bana bir gün. "Gül yüzündeki saatten anladığım kadarıyla, otuzuna gelmiş olmalısın." (s. 17)

Men have so often written about women without knowing the reality of their lives, and worse, without being interested in that daily reality.

NOVELS Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. Exley, Frederick. A Fan's Notes. Kohler, Sheila. One Girl. Miller, Henry. Tropic of Cancer. Salter, James. Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime. Stone, Robert. Dog Soldiers. Welch, James. The Death of Jim Loney. Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. White, Edmund. The Beautiful Room Is Empty. SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS Bloom, Amy. Come to Me. Cameron, Peter. The Half You Don't Know. Carver, Raymond. Where I'm Calling From. Cheever, John. The Stories of John Cheever. Gaitskill, Mary. Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To. Houston, Pam. Cowboys Are My Weakness. Johnson, Denis. Jesus' Son. Nugent, Beth. City of Boys. O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. O'Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. Paley, Grace. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. Perrotta, Tom. Bad Haircut. White, Edmund. Skinned Alive. Yates, Richard. Liars in Love.

Ho sempre disprezzato quella linea retta inevitabile tra due punti. Non per ragioni letterarie, ma perché cancella ogni speranza.” (Conversazione con mio padre).

Tra quindici anni, ragazze, sarete come me, vi sarete sbagliate su tutto. (La corredora di fondo)

Tra quindici anni, ragazze, sarete come me, vi sarete sbagliate su tutto” (La corredora di fondo).

Le madri dicono sempre la verità. Ma non tutta in una volta, bensì poco alla volta, affinché i loro figli possano sopportarla. (Un interesse sincero)

Il tempo è passato come sempre passa il tempo. Non c’è molto altro da dire al riguardo. (Amici)

La gente pensa che la morte sia la cosa peggiore che possa accadere. Non lo è. La cosa peggiore è la vita che continua senza quella persona. (Vita dura)