Quotes from Grace Paley

What we owe men is some freedom from their part in a murderous game in which they kick each other to death with one foot, bracing themselves on our various comfortable places with the other.

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

Poets take themselves very seriously.

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.

I liked the education. I liked people learning things all around me and I liked going to people's classes.

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

I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.

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 all writing every line is important.

The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.

Art's too long and life's too short.

For me, the meaning of life is the next generation.

In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.

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

My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.

Well, by now you must know yourself, honey, whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.

It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.

What I'm interested in doing in a story is bringing certain different languages, people, events together and then letting the reader make what he wants of it.

Art is too long, and life is too short.

I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.

Paul Goodman was not ahead of his time but IN his time.

I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the women's movement. I didn't know my small-drop presence or usefulness in this accumulation.

A joke is necessary at this time.

Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.

You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.