Top 90 Grace Paley Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

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

— Grace Paley

55. “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

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

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

59. “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

60. “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

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

— Grace Paley

62. “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

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

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

65. “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

66. “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

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

— Grace Paley

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

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

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

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

— Grace Paley

74. “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

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

— Grace Paley

77. “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

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

— Grace Paley

79. “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

80. “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

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

— Grace Paley

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

— 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