20th Century Poets From The United States

"I think all art, all these stories that people write, happen when two amazing facts come together in some way, or two amazing events, or two amazing winds, or whatever it is, come and the surprise of this meeting is the story."

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

"children’s writing is so often so beautiful, because it’s so close to their own true tongues. On the other hand, it’s very boring because they have no experience in life."

"I think that any life that’s interesting, lived, has a lot of pulls in it."

"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."

"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."

"For me, somehow, the short story is very close to the poem in feeling and not so close in feeling to the novel, although it’s about the same people that a novel would be about."

"people think that they have to use their brains to figure out how best to retaliate or how best to make war. And it brings us to total hopelessness. (2001)"

"even when my kids were smaller, you had three — people like me had three things to do. They had the family to take care of and to worry about. And they had our political lives to lead — I mean, I should say the business of the war or whatever it was. And then we also had our work, our life work, which for me was literature, which I — which was my great good luck that I had that, because it enabled me to think in another way than a lot of other people. (2003)"

"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)"

"I'm a writer but I'm also a person in the world. I don't feel a terrible obligation to write a lot of books. (1988)"

"That’s the thing about writing. You can bring a lot of stuff together. (2003)"

"I think the women’s movement is wonderful, a great thing. I hate to see some of the mean struggles within it, but I don’t see how it could exist without it. Everybody should try to be as honorable and truthful and fierce as they can be."

"I’ve been surrounded by music for most of my life. Always classical. But I think the most powerful sounds are those voices, those childhood voices. The tune of those voices. Other languages, Russian and Yiddish, coming up smack against the English. I think you hear that a lot in American literature."

"the possibility is that what we need right now is to imagine the real. That is where our leaders are falling down and where we ourselves have to imagine the lives of other people. So men-who get very pissed at me sometimes, even though I really like some of them a lot-men have got to imagine the lives of women, of all kinds of women. Of their daughters, of their own daughters, and of the lives that their daughters lead. White people have to imagine the reality, not the invention but the reality, of the lives of people of color. Imagine it, imagine that reality, and understand it. We have to imagine what is happening in Central America today, in Lebanon and South Africa. We have to really think about it and imagine it and call it to mind, not simply refer to it all the time. What happens is that when you just keep referring to things, you lose them entirely. But what if you think in terms of the life of the people, you really have to keep imagining. You have to think of the reality of what is happening down there, and you have to imagine it...that's one of the things that's most encouraging to me: to think that some of these young guys have been listening, and imagining the lives of their daughters in a new way, and thinking about it, and wanting something different for them. That is what some of imagining is about."

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

"We were accused of having been doomstruck the other day. And in a way we should be, why shouldn't we be? Things are rotten. I'm sixty-one and three-quarters years old and I've seen terrible times during the Depression, and I do think the life of the people was worse during the McCarthy period. I just want to throw that in extra. That is to say the everyday life, the fearful life, of Americans was harder in that time than this. But the objective facts of world events right now are worse than at any other time. And we all know that, we can't deny it, and it's also true that it's very hard to look in the faces of our children, and terrifying to look into the faces of our grandchildren. And I cannot look at my granddaughter's face, really, without shading my eyes a little bit and saying, "Well, listen, Grandma's not going to let that happen." But we have to face it, and they have to face it, just as we had to face what was much less frightening."

"By in love she meant the acuteness of the heart at the sudden sight of a particular person or the way over a couple of years of interested friendship one is suddenly stunned by the lungs' longing for more and more breath in the presence of that friend"

"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."

"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."

"everywhere vast public suffering rose in reeling waves from the round earth's nation-states-hung in the satellite-watched air and settled in no time at all into TV sets and newsrooms. It was all there. Look up and the news of halfway round the planet is falling on us all."

"one of the things that art is about, for me, is justice. Now, that isn't a matter of opinion, really. That isn't to say, "I'm going to show these people right or wrong" or whatever. But what art is about-and this is what justice is about, although you'll have your own interpretations-is the illumination of what isn't known, the lighting up of what is under a rock, of what has been hidden. And I think people feel like that who are beginning to write."

"People do want to be young and beautiful. When they meet in the street, male or female, if they're getting older they look at each other's face a little ashamed. It's clear they want to say, Excuse me, I didn't mean to draw attention to mortality and gravity all at once. I didn't want to remind you, my dear friend, of our coming eviction, first from liveliness, then from life. To which, most of the time, the friend's eyes will courteously reply, My dear, it's nothing at all. I hardly noticed."

"Well, a wish, some wish, Ruth said. Well, I wished that this world wouldn’t end. This world, this world, Ruth said softly."

"What is this crap, Mother, this life is short and terrible. What is this metaphysical shit, what is this disease you intelligentsia are always talking about. First we said: Intelligentsia! Us? Oh, the way words lie down under decades, then the Union of Restless Diggers out of sheer insomnia pulls them up: daggers for the young but to us they look like flowers of nostalgia that grew in our mother’s foreign garden. What did my mother say? Darling, you should have come to Town Hall last night, the whole intelligentsia was there. My uncle, strictly: the intelligentsia will never permit it.!"

"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?"

"It’s hard to stand behind a people and culture in revolutionary transition when you are constantly worried about their irreplaceable and breakable artifacts."

"When I came to think as a writer, it was because I had begun to live among women."

"sometimes walking with a friend I forget the world."

"[Wild] with a dream of wildness."

"Every day in our neighborhood there were whole apartments, beds, bureaus, kitchen tables out on the street. We understood that this was because of capitalism, which didn't care that working people had no work and no money for rent."

"People say the Vietnamese won the war. They did not win the war, the U.S. won the war, just by leaving and starving them to death. You don’t say somebody won the war in a medieval town which is under constant siege. Until the U.S. is certain that the Vietnamese lost the war, until they’re absolutely certain that their condition is totally hopeless, we’re not gonna help them. (2000)"

"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. (2000)"

"Grace, guide us! What is politics to you?/You are such a brave activist!/How do we live, what do we do?/Politics is simply the way human beings treat/one another on the earth."

"It is, as Paley has said elsewhere, not the I" but the "we" that is important."

"who does the world need more these days than Grace Paley? I’m fudging, of course, because these two stories were published originally in different books, but The Collected Stories by Grace Paley is as good a manual as I know of what fiction can accomplish on the page and in the world."

"Poet Robert Pinsky knew Paley for more than 20 years, and he loved her poetry and short fiction. "They're completely lucid," he said. "They take the materials of a life, and make those materials immensely beautiful — that's art.""

"if you’re going to be involved with the Left, you’ve got to start thinking about Israel. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and I became very committed to supporting the Women in Black in ‘87. I formed a group here, the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation (JWCEO) with Clare Kinberg and Grace Paley. We wanted to be identified as Jews protesting."

"At the age of 62, Grace Paley has published just three collections of stories, a total of 45 tales. But nearly all of them are remarkable for their clarity, their sense of place, their sympathies. As Philip Roth has said, Paley's stories display "an understanding of loneliness, lust, selfishness, and fatigue that is splendidly comic and unladylike"...Paley is a genuine article, unpretentious, funny, and wise. In the words of her neighbor and colleague in fiction, Donald Barthelme, she is a "wonderful writer and troublemaker." Paley's second-floor living room is vintage Village. Bookshelves crammed with Babel and Chekhov and Marx, records piled into a Hellman's mayonnaise box, a sad rag rug, artifacts of politics, woolly pillows strewn on the floor, three empty light sockets in the ceiling. The lived-in look."

"she knew so well how be free in them"

"people joke about leaflet prose, but I've been writing and reading leaflets and I challenge my sister and brother writers to try to write a leaflet that moves people to action. I've seen it done. The Women's Pentagon Action statement, written in 1980 by Grace Paley in collaboration with dozens of women, actually inspired a lot of us to take action."

"Grace Paley's outrageously wise story, "Zagrowsky Tells.""

"things are in motion. Grace Paley has said, when people stand up, other people discover they've got legs. While there are limits to this kind of analogy (not everyone can stand, or has legs for that matter), the motion is unmistakeable."

"Grace Paley says, "By the third line, I know whether it's going to turn into a poem or a story. With poems, I talk to people. In stories, they talk to me.""

"On the literary front, Grace Paley is the nation’s — one of the most acclaimed writers in the nation."

"All over the world, she is read as a master storyteller in the great tradition: People love life more because of her writing."

""Can you think of a writer (besides Chekhov) who is holy and an artist?" "Grace Paley." She (Mary Gordon) smiled. "Well, yes." Obviously."

"(Whom do you consider your literary heroes?) Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, Emily Brontë, Ray Bradbury, all for different reasons, all adored...I had the extreme honor of reading with Grace several times. On one occasion there was the potential of some political differences with the audience. Nervous, I asked Grace what we should do if we were heckled. She said, “Honey, we’ll just sink to their level.” Then she stood on a box because she was too tiny to reach the microphone and quickly made everyone fall in love with her."

"probably the education in nonviolent direct action couldn’t have been learned without a war. It had to take a war for people to learn that things could be defied and resisted. I think that was a very important legacy of the peace movement. (2000)"

"Human beings come from several million years of development, which is quite wonderful. I have a lot of regard for what human beings have become. It took us a million years to learn how to speak to each other, and we did it. It took us another million years to work with each other, and we did it. I think the human race is remarkable…Until we live in a world where we stop abusing each other and the other creatures, we will not have reached our perfection."