Top 90 Grace Paley Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Grace Paley

2. “Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.”

— Grace Paley

3. “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.”

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

5. “Art’s too long and life’s too short.”

— Grace Paley

6. “The best training is to read and write, no matter what. Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work. Don’t lie, buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.”

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

8. “I don’t believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person’s senses.”

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

10. “Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world. That’s why it almost always has to be on the side of the underdog.”

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

12. “I liked the education. I liked people learning things all around me and I liked going to people’s classes.”

— Grace Paley

13. “We write about what we don’t know about what we know...”

— Grace Paley

14. “People will sometimes say, “Why don’t you write more politics?” And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women IS politics.”

— Grace Paley

15. “Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.”

— Grace Paley

16. “I’m seventy-five now. I also have the peculiar luck of having a sister and brother who are fourteen and sixteen years older than me. Their health is not good. It couldn’t be at that age. But their spirits are. Both my brother and my sister are an example to me.”

— Grace Paley

17. “If you’re feminist, it means that you’ve noticed that male ownership of the direction of female lives has been the order of the day for a few thousand years, and it isn’t natural.”

— Grace Paley

18. “It wasn’t until I lived in the countryside that I began to understand the life of the countryside and the people in it and trees and water. Just learning about water is an education for a city person.”

— Grace Paley

19. “I write for the still, small possibility of justice.”

— Grace Paley

20. “You become a writer because you need to become a writer – nothing else.”

— Grace Paley

21. “If you want to do things, do things.”

— Grace Paley

22. “As an older person, I do feel an obligation to tell the story about what was really happening in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, as I saw it.”

— Grace Paley

23. “I didn’t write any fiction until I was past thirty.”

— Grace Paley

24. “My job is to get people to write something truthful, something about truth and beauty – wherever they are – and to understand how literature is made. And then if they become great writers, that’s great, and probably has nothing to do with me.”

— Grace Paley

25. “But what’s a writer for? The whole point is to put yourself into other lives, other heads-writers have always done that. If you screw up, so someone will tell you, that’s all.”

— Grace Paley

26. “I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don’t always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.”

— Grace Paley

27. “I didn’t intend to become a short-story writer. I became one because I finished a couple of short stories and realized that’s what I wanted to do and could do with children and with all the other things in my life.”

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

30. “My family were Russian Jews. They got you to read as soon as you could. And then assumed you would read a lot. People didn’t really tell stories but they were good talkers. That’s important for a writer, to hear speakers.”

— Grace Paley

31. “If you’re old and you’re healthy and you’re active – I don’t mean you have to be politically active – if you remain interested in other people and the world, then you live as well as your health will allow.”

— Grace Paley

32. “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.”

— Grace Paley

33. “The only recognizable feature of hope is action.”

— Grace Paley

34. “There isn’t a story written that isn’t about blood and money. People and their relationship to each other is the blood, the family. And how they live, the money of it.”

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

36. “You come to doing what you do by not being able to do something.”

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

40. “Just when I most needed important conversation, a sniff of the man-wide world, that is, at least one brainy companion who could translate my friendly language into his tongue of undying carnal love, I was forced to lounge in our neighborhood park, surrounded by children.”

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

43. “I didn’t intend. The word “intend” is the wrong word for what I do. It’s just that it’s something you do, and you can’t not do. If you want to do it, and you don’t intend to, you do it anyway. The word “intend” is wrong. The word “pressure” is right. It’s like any art form.”

— Grace Paley

44. “For me, the meaning of life is the next generation.”

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

46. “I know I’ve done good work. I’ve been very serious about my writing, and I’ve done the best that I could. But I don’t feel that I’ve done more than I should have. In fact, I’ve done less than I should have.”

— Grace Paley

47. “Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.”

— Grace Paley

48. “People say, “Why do you call your kids up, why do you worry like that?” And I say, “I was raised like that.” My grandmother looked at my father with the same eyes when he was sixty and she was eighty-five.”

— Grace Paley

49. “My mother went to demonstrations. I remember her going to a big demonstration for Earl Brower and she came home crying and said the Communists were very mean and booed their people. I remember feeling sad at her feeling sad.”

— Grace Paley

50. “Most of the Womens Libbers I knew really didnt want to have a piece of the mens pie. They thought that pie was kind of poisonous, toxic, really full of weapons, poison gases, all kinds of mean junk we didnt even want a slice of.”

— Grace Paley