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
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.
writing justice possibility
I write for the still, small possibility of justice.
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.
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.
class people
I liked the education. I liked people learning things all around me and I liked going to people's classes.
believe ideas fads
I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.
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.
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.
new-york book college
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.
war wind oil
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.
want ifs
If you want to do things, do things.
children chinese littles
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.
real destiny deserve
Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
action features
The only recognizable feature of hope is action.