Grace Paley Quotes & Sayings

“Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.”

“In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.”

“All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.”

“I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.”

“If you want to do things, do things.”

“Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.”

“Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.”

“Most of the Women's Libbers I knew really didn't want to have a piece of the men's pie. They thought that pie was kind of poisonous, toxic, really full of weapons, poison gases, all kinds of mean junk we didn't even want a slice of.”

“'The Immigrant Story,' which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn't think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That's the only way you get it sometimes.”

“I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the women's movement. I didn't know my small-drop presence or usefulness in this accumulation.”