Grace Paley Quotes

People's imagination has been changed a lot by television. (1980)

that, I think, is really where lots of literature comes from. It really comes, not from knowing so much, but from not knowing. It comes from what you're curious about. It comes from what obsesses you. It comes from what you want to know.

you're in love many times in your life, several times in one's life. And romantic love is very... a lot of fun, I don't want to knock it. With all the troubles that come afterward, and it may all be a lie and imposed on us, but falling in love is peachy. And if it can happen to you, boy, that's great. And if it doesn't, then by all means, you should stick to your friends. (1981)

Stay open and ignorant.

all the arts feed each other (1980)

(Why didn't you stick with poetry?) GP: I write a lot of poetry. I just never get good. Poetry is too literary a thing which comes from my love of literature rather than from my love of people, my feeling for people. (1980)

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.

Concentration is really a problem for me. To seize something. But when I really have a story I'm working on, I can work on it sitting in a train, going to Washington, any place, anywhere. It's totally absorbing. (1980)

For happiness, she also required work to do in this world and bread on the table.

[Wild] with a dream of wildness.

things that concern me very much still . . . first of all, I still think a lot about Vietnam. I was there in ’69, in Hanoi, and also I traveled through all of the North from the DMZ, and so I saw an awful lot of it and I felt the people very much. I was at that time very involved in dealing with American POWs. I don’t think in my life I’ll ever get over those concerns and the injustice of the United States not simply acting out its responsibilities to Vietnam. Those things are not over for me. And the question of amnesty . . . they’re related. But I’m not as active. I act when I’m called upon. I guess I began to think of myself as more of a pacifist, which is sort of funny when you think that I was very strongly on the side of the really very fierce North Vietnamese and Vietcong. But still, I think disarmament is a tremendously important issue. So I’m really responding in many ways. I still work with the War Resisters’ League and with Resist.

One of the horses history rides is language. Fifteen years ago, maybe ten, in my fifties, I wouldn't have noticed the word mankind at all. And here in 1986, a six-year-old person heard the word in all its meaning. (1985)

if you don’t think history, you’re not thinking. You’re just not thinking if you cannot see a generation back. And if you do not think about the circumstances in their lives, then you don’t know what you’re thinking about. There’s no truth in the present moment. Now simply doesn’t exist without then at all.

when people say, “What can poets do?” I often say, “Just what any other working group could do to get anything accomplished, and that is to organize.” (2003)

you can only teach learners. You can’t teach any subject to anybody who isn’t there to want to know.