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Grace Paley Quotes (1922-2007)
Writer, Poet, Activist
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About Grace Paley
Grace Paley (December 11 1922 ā August 22 2007) was a Jewish American short story writer, poet, teacher, and political activist. The 1994 edition of her Collected Stories was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Grace Paley quotes.
āart comes from constant mental harassment.ā
āShe remembered that he was a person who had killed.ā
āPeople's imagination has been changed a lot by television. (1980)ā
āI think that any life thatās interesting, lived, has a lot of pulls in it.ā
āthereās always that first storytelling impulse: I want to tell you something...ā
āeverybody should be involved, not just the artists. Carpenters, teachers, everybody.ā
āI brought up lonesomeness again, and not being understood at all except by some women everybody hated.ā
āDonāt go through life without reading the autobiographies of Emma Goldman, Prince Kropotkin, Malcolm Xā
āI always say that racism is like pneumonia and anti-Semitism is like the common coldāeverybody has it.ā
Grace Paley Quotes by Topic
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Grace Paley on Writing 4 quotes
āI think a lot of what influences a writer is what you hear in the street, the language you hear, the way people talk, the way, the rhythms, the song, the language of your childhood.ā
Grace Paley on Women's liberation movement 3 quotes
āThereās hardly a woman writer who doesnāt receive some kind of support from the womenās movement. Weāre very lucky to be living and writing now.ā
Grace Paley on United States 3 quotes
āI hate the American expectation of violence. Iām not going to play into any of that. When I must write about violence, I will, but Iāll do it straight, not add and add because the level is higher every year.ā
Grace Paley on Art 2 quotes
āart comes from constant mental harassment.ā
Grace Paley on Literature 2 quotes
āI think thatās what literature is about; itās the struggle for truth. Itās the struggle for what you donāt understandā
Grace Paley on Man 2 quotes
āI have to say that war is man-made. It's made by men. It's their thing, it's their world, and they're terribly injured in it. They suffer terribly in it, but it's made by men. How do they come to live this way?ā
Grace Paley on Television
āPeople's imagination has been changed a lot by television.ā
Grace Paley on Happiness
Grace Paley on Racism
āI always say that racism is like pneumonia and anti-Semitism is like the common coldāeverybody has it.ā
Grace Paley on Antisemitism
āI always say that racism is like pneumonia and anti-Semitism is like the common coldāeverybody has it.ā
Grace Paley on Revenge
āpeople think that they have to use their brains to figure out how best to retaliate or how best to make war. And it brings us to total hopelessness.ā
Grace Paley on Poets
āwhen people say, āWhat can poets do?ā I often say, āJust what any other working group could do to get anything accomplished, and that is to organize.āā
What Grace Paley Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Grace Paley shared regarding contemporaries.
Grace Paley on James Joyce 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on James Joyce →Grace Paley on Tillie Olsen 2 quotes
āTillie Olson and I didnāt know it, but we were part of a movement.ā
Grace Paley on Clarice Lispector 2 quotes
āClarice Lispector spent the first two months of her life in the town of Chechelnik in Ukraine. This is a small, short fact. The interesting question, unanswered in the places I've looked for it, is: At what age did she enter the Portuguese language? And how much Russian did she bring with her? Any Yiddish? Sometimes I think this is what her work is about . . . one language trying to make itself at home in another. Sometimes there's hospitality, sometimes a quarrelā
Grace Paley on Isaac Babel 2 quotes
āmy favorite writer, the writer that I loved the most for a long time, was Isaak Babel. First of all, I was doing short stories then I began to read himāI hadnāt read himāand I felt, Oh my, itās just what I want to do. Heās really writing about things he doesnāt exactly know and yet heās trying to understand, heās using writing to try to understand the world and thatās what I want to do. And thatās what I do. I write about things I donāt know all that well just to try and understand them. The act of writing is an investigative, learning act.ā
Grace Paley on Malcolm X
āDonāt go through life without reading the autobiographies of Emma Goldman, Prince Kropotkin, Malcolm Xā
Grace Paley on Emma Goldman
āDonāt go through life without reading the autobiographies of Emma Goldman, Prince Kropotkin, Malcolm Xā
Grace Paley on Tim O'Brien (author)
Grace Paley on Saul Bellow
Grace Paley on Naomi Replansky
āHer feelings are deep and expressed without shame or coyness. She's straightforward. She offers the difficult product-clarity. She makes a music for which readers of poetry have been lonesome for years.ā
Grace Paley on Walt Whitman
āI read a lot. In poetry, I liked W. H. Auden more than anyone. I loved British writers and the novels I grew up with, Twain, Dickens, and so on. I was not influenced say by Walt Whitman or anyone like that. His freedom was not my freedom, and so it didnāt affect me.ā
Grace Paley on Mothers
āit was kind of exhausting running after two babies. Still, looking back I see the pleasure of it. Thatās when I began to know women very wellāas co-workers, really...If I hadnāt spent that time in the playground, I wouldnāt have written a lot of those stories.ā
Quotes About Grace Paley
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Sandra Cisneros on Grace Paley
ā(What moves you most in a work of literature?) Iām not yet the writer I aspire to be, but at my age, great books written by women over 60 give me hope. Diana Athill, Colette, Harriett Doerr, Marguerite Duras, Grace Paley, Elena Poniatowska, Jean Rhys, MercĆ© Rodoreda, to name but a few.ā
Blache Gelfany article on Grace Paley
āHer peers have praised her publicly. Philip Roth called her a "genuine writer of prose," and Herbert Gold, "an exciting writer." Susan Sontag, perhaps selling short Paley's deliberate artistry, called her "a rare kind of writer"-a "natural." Donald Barthelme said simply she was "wonderful."ā
Amy Goodman on on Grace Paley
Vivian Gornick blurb for on Grace Paley
āAll over the world, she is read as a master storyteller in the great tradition: People love life more because of her writing.ā
Alice Hoffman on Grace Paley
ā(Whom do you consider your literary heroes?) Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, Emily BrontĆ«, Ray Bradbury, all for different reasons, all adored...I had the extreme honor of reading with Grace several times. On one occasion there was the potential of some political differences with the audience. Nervous, I asked Grace what we should do if we were heckled. She said, āHoney, weāll just sink to their level.ā Then she stood on a box because she was too tiny to reach the microphone and quickly made everyone fall in love with her.ā
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz on Grace Paley 2 quotes
āthings are in motion. Grace Paley has said, when people stand up, other people discover they've got legs. While there are limits to this kind of analogy (not everyone can stand, or has legs for that matter), the motion is unmistakeable.ā
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz "While Patriarchy Explodes on Grace Paley
āpeople joke about leaflet prose, but I've been writing and reading leaflets and I challenge my sister and brother writers to try to write a leaflet that moves people to action. I've seen it done. The Women's Pentagon Action statement, written in 1980 by Grace Paley in collaboration with dozens of women, actually inspired a lot of us to take action.ā
Maxine Hong Kingston on Grace Paley 2 quotes
āGrace Paley says, "By the third line, I know whether it's going to turn into a poem or a story. With poems, I talk to people. In stories, they talk to me."ā
Irena Klepfisz on Grace Paley 2 quotes
āHeroes: Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, Shirley Chisholm ā what a generation!ā
Nicole Krauss about short stories on Grace Paley
Elizabeth McCracken interview quoted on Grace Paley
āwho does the world need more these days than Grace Paley? Iām fudging, of course, because these two stories were published originally in different books, but The Collected Stories by Grace Paley is as good a manual as I know of what fiction can accomplish on the page and in the world.ā
Naomi Shihab Nye on Grace Paley
āGrace, guide us! What is politics to you?/You are such a brave activist!/How do we live, what do we do?/Politics is simply the way human beings treat/one another on the earth.ā
About Grace Paley
Grace Paley (December 11 1922 ā August 22 2007) was a Jewish American short story writer, poet, teacher, and political activist. The 1994 edition of her Collected Stories was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.