Quotes from Grace Paley

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Remembering is organized for significance (not usefulness)

The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.

What I generally tell a class is that if you're not interested in anybody else's work but your own, take another class.

I should have written more. I should have written more during the period when I just liked so much doing the political work in the streets.

I read a lot. I liked a tremendous number of poets and writers. The person whose work I liked the most was Joyce.

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.

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.

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

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