Grace Paley quotes

Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world. (Grace Paley)
You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else. View quote
Grace Paley
I thought of praying for divine guidance in line with the great spiritual renaissance of our time. But I am all thumbs in that kind of deciduous conversation. I asked myself, did I, as God's creature under the stars, have the right to evade an event, a factual occurrence, to parry an experience or even a small peradventure. View quote
Grace Paley
Plot, the absolute line between two points which I've always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life. View quote
Grace Paley
I am ambitious, but it's a long-range thing with me. I have my confidential sights on a star, but there's half a lifetime to get to it. Meanwhile I keep my eyes open and am well dressed. View quote
Grace Paley
Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world. View quote
Grace Paley
The only recognizable feature of hope is action. View quote
Grace Paley
That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality. View quote
Grace Paley
There is a long time in me between knowing and telling. View quote
Grace Paley
In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty. View quote
Grace Paley
If you want to do things, do things. (Grace Paley)
I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander. View quote
Grace Paley
We made for him a great dinner of honor. At this dinner I said to him, for the last time, I thought, "Goodbye, dear friend, topic of my life, now we part." And to myself I said further: Finished. This is your lonesome bed. A lady what they call fat and fifty. You made it personally. From this lonesome bed you will finally fall to a bed not so lonesome, only crowded with a million bones. View quote
Grace Paley
But I do like this language -- wheat and chaff -- with its widening pool of foreign genes, and since I never have had any occasion to say "comestible,” it was pleasurable to think it. View quote
Grace Paley
In no time at all his cheerful face appeared at the door of the spring dusk. In the street among peaceable strangers he did a handstand. Then easy and impervious, in full control, he cartwheeled eastward into the source of night. View quote
Grace Paley
No, George said, you don't understand. The pinball machine--any pinball machine you play in any penny arcade--is so remarkable, so fine, so shrewdly threaded. It is already beautiful in necessity and sufficiency of wire, connection, possibility. View quote
Grace Paley
Peter sighed. He turned the palms of his hands up as though to guess at rain. Anna knew him, theme and choreography. The sunshiny spring afternoon seeped through his fingers. He looked up at the witnessing heavens to keep what he could. He dropped his arms and let the rest go. View quote
Grace Paley
The organization of his ideas was all wrong; I was drawn to the memory of myself -- a mere stripling of a girl -- the day I learned that the shortest distance between any two points was a great circle. View quote
Grace Paley
With a few grasping, kind words and a modern gimmick, she hoped to breathe eternity into a mortal matter, love. View quote
Grace Paley
I brought up lonesomeness again, and not being understood at all except by some women everybody hated. View quote
Grace Paley
Like a good and happy man increasing his virtue, he kissed her. She did not move away from him. She remained in the embrace of his right arm, her face nuzzling his shoulder, her eyes closed. He tipped her chin to look and measure opportunity. She could not open her eyes. Honorably he searched, but on her face he met no quarrel. (Grace Paley)
My last girl was Jewish, which is often a warm kind of girl, concerned about food intake and employability. They don't like you to work too hard, I understand, until you're hooked and then, you bastard, sweat! View quote
Grace Paley
Don't you wish you could rise powerfully above your time and name? I'm sure we all try, but here we are, always slipping and falling down into them, speaking their narrow language, though the subject, which is how to save the world--and quickly--is immense. View quote
Grace Paley
Thank God for the head. The head is the only place you got to be young when the usual place gets used up. View quote
Grace Paley
It is still hard to believe that a man who sends out the Ten Commandments every year for a Christmas card can be so easy buttoning and unbuttoning. View quote
Grace Paley