Grace Paley Quotes

37 quotes in 614 categories

• 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…
• 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.…
• The only recognizable feature of hope is action.
• …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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
• Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.
• That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality.
• This hill crossed with broken pines and maples lumpy with the burial mounds of uprooted hemlocks (hurricane of '38) out of their rotting hearts generations…
• Poets take themselves very seriously.
• I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way…
• In prose, I think you sometimes have to write in very plain language, where every line may not seem to be so important, though in…
• Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.
• You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.
• If you want to do things, do things.
• In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.

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