Top 90 Grace Paley Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Grace Paley

2. “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

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

— 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. “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

10. “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

11. “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

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

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

14. “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

15. “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

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

— Grace Paley

17. “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

18. “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

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

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

21. “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

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

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

27. “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

28. “Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.”

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

30. “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

31. “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

32. “When you think of things that influenced your life, Mother Goose influenced more people than almost any other thing, the rhythms of those poems. Everything after that was a bare imitation of some of those mysterious and materialistic poems.”

— Grace Paley

33. “That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality.”

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

35. “It’s a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.”

— Grace Paley

36. “Old age is not a good thing. It can be really hard, and those of us who have it a little easier should keep in mind that there are hundreds of thousands of people who are not as well off.”

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

38. “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

39. “I’m really sorry for people growing up right now, because they have some cockeyed idea that they can get by with their eyes closed; the cane they’re tapping is money, and that won’t take them in the right direction.”

— Grace Paley

40. “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

41. “I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.”

— Grace Paley

42. “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

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

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

45. “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

46. “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

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

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

49. “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

50. “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