165 Quotes by Grace Paley

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.

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.

People say, “Why do you call your kids up, why do you worry like that?” And I say, “I was raised like that.” My grandmother looked at my father with the same eyes when he was sixty and she was eighty-five.

Paley said of her dreams for her grandchildren: “It would be a world without militarism and racism and greed – and where women don’t have to fight for their place in the world.

I am very interested in people trying to write because I don’t have a big academic background at all.

I know I’ve done good work. I’ve been very serious about my writing, and I’ve done the best that I could. But I don’t feel that I’ve done more than I should have. In fact, I’ve done less than I should have.

I’ve started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.

Well, by now you must know yourself, honey, whatever you do, life don’t stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.

I liked the education. I liked people learning things all around me and I liked going to people’s classes.