Grace Paley > Quotes

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

“There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“The only thing you should have to do is find work you love to do. And I can't imagine living without having loved a person. A man, in my case. It could be a woman, but whatever. I think, what I always tell kids when they get out of class and ask, 'What should I do now?' I always say, 'Keep a low overhead. You're not going to make a lot of money.' And the next thing I say: 'Don't live with a person who doesn't respect your work.' That's the most important thing—that's more important than the money thing. I think those two things are very valuable pieces of information.”
― Grace Paley

“The only recognizable feature of hope is action.”
― Grace Paley

“You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.”
― Grace Paley

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

“Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”
― Grace Paley

“Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.”
― Grace Paley

“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

“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.”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“You write from what you know but you write into what you don't know.”
― Grace Paley

“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, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“…I go through a story for lies. I might discover the lie of trying to show off. Sometimes they’re lies of character. Sometimes they are lies of writing the most beautiful sentence in the world that has nothing to do with the story.”
― Grace Paley

“Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?”
― Grace Paley, Wayward Girls and Wicked Women

“The wrong word is like a lie jammed inside the story.”
― Grace Paley

“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.”
― Grace Paley

“To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.”
― Grace Paley, Fidelity: Poems

“The younger people with the ache of youth were eating all the cheese.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“‏Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work.”
― Grace Paley

“Edie didn't budge. She leaned her chin on her knees and felt sad. She was a big reader too, but she liked THE BOBBSEY TWINS or HONEY BUNCH AT THE SEASHORE. She loved that nice family life. She tried to live it in the three rooms on the fourth floor. Sometimes she called her father Dad, or even Father, which surprised him. Who? he asked.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“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, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“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, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“Near home I ran through our park, where I had aired my children on weekends and late-summer afternoons. I stopped at the northeast playground, where I met a dozen young mothers intelligently handling their little ones. In order to prepare them, meaning no harm, I said, In fifteen years, you girls will be like me, wrong in everything”
― Grace Paley

“I wanted a sailboat, he said. But you didn’t want anything. Don’t be bitter, I said. It’s never too late. No, he said with a great deal of bitterness. I may get a sailboat. As a matter of fact I have money down on an eighteen-foot two-rigger. I’m doing well this year and can look forward to better. But as for you, it’s too late. You’ll always want nothing. 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. I looked through The House of Mirth, but lost interest. I felt extremely accused. Now, it’s true, I’m short of requests and absolute requirements. But I do want something. I want, for instance, to be a different person.”
― Grace Paley, The Collected Stories

“Air was filtering out of my two collapsing lungs. Water rose, bubbling to enter, and I would have died of instantaneous pneumonia - something I have never heard of - if my hand had not got hold of a glass ashtray and, entirely apart from my personal decision, flung it.”
― Grace Paley, The Collected Stories

“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, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“Remembering is organized for significance (not usefulness)”
― Grace Paley, Just As I Thought

“Who cares?' said Judy, who didn't care.”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“it is possible with only a little extra anguish
to live in this world at absolute [minimum?]
loving brainy sexual energetic redeemed”
― Grace Paley

“I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them.
The librarian said $32 even and you've owed it for eighteen years. I didn't deny anything. Because I don't understand how time passes. I have had those books. I have often thought of them. The library is only two blocks away.”
― Grace Paley