Top 90 Grace Paley Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.”

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

53. “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

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

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

56. “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

57. “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

58. “Well! I decided to bring those two books back to the library. Which proves that when a person or an event comes along to jolt or appraise me I CAN take some appropriate action, although I am better known for my hospitable remarks.”

— Grace Paley

59. “In the park I met other women and I started to get interested in their lives. I developed a lot of pressure to talk about women’s lives, and children’s lives, too. Children interest me tremendously.”

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

61. “Today’s wars are about oil. But alternate energies exist now – solar, wind – for every important energy-using activity in our lives. The only human work that cannot be done without oil is war.”

— Grace Paley

62. “The men don’t like their wives so much. They only get married if it’s a good idea.” Faith.”

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

64. “When you have a peace movement that has an actual war, it’s different from one that has wars that our country is not totally involved in. During the war in Vietnam, and to a lesser degree the wars in Central America where our country was directly involved, it was easier to organize.”

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

66. “Well, you have children so you know: little children little troubles, big children, big troubles – it’s a saying in Yiddish. Maybe the Chinese said it too.”

— Grace Paley

67. “Whatever you do, life don’t stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.”

— Grace Paley

68. “Paul Goodman was not ahead of his time but IN his time.”

— Grace Paley

69. “I lived in a house in the East Bronx, a totally Jewish neighborhood on East 172nd Street. You didn’t see Christians much, although one lived next door. We thought they were kind of a minority.”

— Grace Paley

70. “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.”

— Grace Paley

71. “If I miss anything, it’s being able to hang out in the city of New York meeting people and talking to them on the corner.”

— Grace Paley

72. “Sometimes before people know what they’re saying, they already love the language.”

— Grace Paley

73. “Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.”

— Grace Paley

74. “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.”

— Grace Paley

75. “I did write a number of reports on my political experiences, but there were many omissions, and I feel bad about that because it was work that was interesting and had I written more about it, it could have been useful.”

— Grace Paley

76. “Paley said of her dreams for her grandchildren: “It would be a world without militarism and racism and greed – and where women don’t have to fight for their place in the world.”

— Grace Paley

77. “To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.”

— Grace Paley

78. “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.”

— Grace Paley

79. “The word career is a divisive word. It’s a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.”

— Grace Paley

80. “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.”

— Grace Paley

81. “I don’t have any degrees. I went to Hunter College one year and New York University another year. It’s just on the basis of my books that I’ve been hired at any of the places I’ve been.”

— Grace Paley

82. “No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.”

— Grace Paley

83. “I am very interested in people trying to write because I don’t have a big academic background at all.”

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

85. “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.”

— Grace Paley

86. “A joke is necessary at this time.”

— Grace Paley

87. “I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.”

— Grace Paley

88. “I’ve started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.”

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

90. “He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber’s snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, halfway to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment. What I mean is, I sat down on the library steps and he went away.”

— Grace Paley

91. “My dear, no one knows the power of good sense. It hasn’t been built up or experimented with sufficiently.”

— Grace Paley