Quotes by Grace Paley

“You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else”

“All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.”

“Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world”

“You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.”

“. . . people will sometimes say, Why dont you write more politics? And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women is politics.”

“I dont believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a persons senses.”

“I often see through things right to the apparition itself.”

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

“I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; its a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.”

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

The only thing you should have to do is find work you love to do. And I cant 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. Youre not going to make a lot of money. And the next thing I say: Dont live with a person who doesnt respect your work. Thats the most important thing—thats more important than the money thing. I think those two things are very valuable pieces of information.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Remembering is organized for significance (not usefulness)

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

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 Websters or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.