Grace Paley (December 11, 1922 – August 22, 2007) was an American short story author, poet, teacher, and political activist.
I liked the education. I liked people learning things all around me and I liked going to people's classes.
I've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.
Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.
In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.
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.
People will sometimes say, "Why don't you write more politics?" And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women IS politics.
That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality.
For me, the meaning of life is the next generation.
It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
I didn't intend to become a short-story writer. I became one because I finished a couple of short stories and realized that's what I wanted to do and could do with children and with all the other things in my life.
There isn't a story written that isn't about blood and money. People and their relationship to each other is the blood, the family. And how they live, the money of it.
Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.
If you're old and you're healthy and you're active - I don't mean you have to be politically active - if you remain interested in other people and the world, then you live as well as your health will allow.
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.
Art's too long and life's too short.
If you want to do things, do things.
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.
You come to doing what you do by not being able to do something.