Grace Paley quotes - page 3
Even as a kid, it wasn't to big stories of heroism that I listened but to the everyday people on my block more than anything else. Since I thought of my father and mother as somewhat heroic in their early years, what interested me tremendously was how this whole other world of people living every day, how they lived their lives. I think most people are heroic to a degree, they're heroic in caring for the lives of the people around them and not dumping each other or dumping on each other.
Grace Paley
A great deal has been written about that hostility at Waterloo, as though a country that refuses to pass something as simple as the Equal Rights Amendment would not have pockets of vicious misogyny, as though a nation with tens of thousands of nuclear bombs, Army bases, weapons factories in the midst of unemployment would not be able to raise a furious patriarchal horde.
Grace Paley
When I talk about the religious attitude of my family, people like to say words about Jewish self-hatred. But there was none of that. There was no wish not to be Jewish. There was no desire to pretend we were something else. In fact, along with his opposition to religion, my father had biblical feeling and knowledge which he shared with me. And this was true to such a degree that I just grew up liking things Jewish, kind of pleased with myself for having had the sense to be born into this family instead of some other. When I left home and lived in the Midwest, it would be one of the first things I would tell people, really-at least in the beginning.
Grace Paley
I have to begin by saying that as far as I know, and even listening to all the people talking earlier, I have to say that war is man-made. It's made by men. It's their thing, it's their world, and they're terribly injured in it. They suffer terribly in it, but it's made by men. How do they come to live this way?
Grace Paley
writers who are young or maybe just young in writing. To tell them that no matter what you feel about what you're doing, if that is really what you're looking for, if that is really what you're trying to understand, if that is really what you're stupid about, if that's what you're dumb about and you're trying to understand it, stay with it, no matter what, and you'll at least live your own truth or be hung for it.
Grace Paley
I really wrote in his (W.H. Auden's) style. I was crazy about him. I loved his poems so much that I was using this British language all the time-I was saying trousers and subaltern and things like that. You understand I was a Bronx kid. We went through a few poems, and he kept asking me, do you really talk like that? And I kept saying, Oh yeah, well, sometimes. That was the great thing I learned from Auden: that you'd better talk your own language. Then I asked him what young writers now ask me-and I always tell them this story-I said to Auden, Well, do you think I should keep writing? He laughed and then became very solemn. If you're a writer, he said, you'll keep writing no matter what. That's not a question a writer should ask. Something like that, not exactly, but close.
Grace Paley
I will say I knew I wanted to write about women and children, but I put it off for a couple of years because I thought, People will think this is trivial, nothing. Then I thought, It's what I have to write. It's what I want to read. And I don't see it out there. Meanwhile, the women's movement had begun to gather force. It needed to become the second wave. It turned out that we were some of the drops in the wave. Tillie Olsen was more like a cupful.
Grace Paley
I'd never known pacifists before. My parents were very peaceful people and socialists, and they were always against all wars, but pacifism was not a Russian socialist idea. Somebody invited [peace and civil rights activist and WRL staffer] Bayard Rustin to talk, and Mary Gandall and I listened to him with our mouths open. We were both so impressed-it was like the good news, as they say about Jesus. We were getting very good news about how to think about the world.
Grace Paley
If you look out that window, it's so amazing, and the countryside is being murdered. People don't understand what is being done to their countryside. In some parts of the world, they seem to understand it better than here. Here we don't seem to get it that the fields are being wrecked by poisons and the air is close to the end of breathable. There is a great effort in America to stay happy and not worry and not understand and not do anything about it.
Grace Paley
