Grace Paley
Grace Paley
Grace Paleywas an American short story writer, poet, teacher, and political activist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth11 December 1922
CountryUnited States of America
justice underdog world
Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world. That's why it almost always has to be on the side of the underdog.
careers normal divides
The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.
good-life survival interest-in-life
All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.
action features
The only recognizable feature of hope is action.
facts doe hindsight
Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.
real writing vocabulary
My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.
mean order years
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.
book reality heartbreaking
That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality.
writing people trying
I am very interested in people trying to write because I don't have a big academic background at all.
husband years library
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.
summer running sweet
Here I am in the garden laughing an old woman with heavy breasts and a nicely mapped face how did this happen well that's who I wanted to be at last a woman in the old style sitting stout thighs apart under a big skirt grandchild sliding on off my lap a pleasant summer perspiration that's my old man across the yard he's talking to the meter reader he's telling him the world's sad story how electricity is oil or uranium and so forth I tell my grandson run over to your grandpa ask him to sit beside me for a minute I am suddenly exhausted by my desire to kiss his sweet explaining lips.
saws stories obligation
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.
summer spring heart
This hill crossed with broken pines and maples lumpy with the burial mounds of uprooted hemlocks (hurricane of '38) out of their rotting hearts generations rise trying once more to become the forest just beyond them tall enough to be called trees in their youth like aspen a bouquet of young beech is gathered they still wear last summer's leaves the lightest brown almost translucent how their stubbornness has decorated the winter woods.
writing needs
You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.