Later the Same Day Quotes

“The younger people with the ache of youth were eating all the cheese.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“Edie didn't budge. She leaned her chin on her knees and felt sad. She was a big reader too, but she liked THE BOBBSEY TWINS or HONEY BUNCH AT THE SEASHORE. She loved that nice family life. She tried to live it in the three rooms on the fourth floor. Sometimes she called her father Dad, or even Father, which surprised him. Who? he asked.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“Also, we once had the moral or utilitarian idea that brainy labor must happen early; it must precede the work of love or be damaged by the residual weight of all that damp reality.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“Haven't we agreed often, haven't we said that it had become noticeable that life is short and sorrowful? Haven't we said the words "gone" and "where"? Haven't we sometimes in the last few years used the word "terrible" and we mean to include in it the word "terror"? Everyone knows this about life. Though of course some fools never stop singing it praises.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“Silence--the space that follows unkindness in which little truths growl.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“Why don't you tell me stories told by women about women?

Those are too private.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“They walked east and south to neighborhoods where our city, in fields of garbage and broken brick, stands desolate, her windows burnt and blind. Here, Faith said, the people suffer and struggle, their children turn round and round in one place, growing first in beauty, then in rage.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“Whenever I got to like one of his opinions he'd change it, and he never liked any of mine.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“He was a busy man selling discount furniture in a rough neighborhood during the day, and reading reading reading, thinking writing grieving all night the bad world-ending politics which were using up the last years of his life.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“She also doesn't like how I talk to women. She says I called Mrs. Z. a grizzly bear a few times. It's my wife, no? That I was winking and blinking at the girls, a few pinches. A lie... maybe I patted, but I never pinched. Besides, I know for a fact a couple of them loved it. She says, No. None of them liked it. Not one. They only put up with it because it wasn't time yet in history to holler. (An American-born girl has some nerve to mention history.)”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“Thank God for the head. Inside the head is the only place you got to be young when the usual place gets used up.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“You do not say to a woman of my age who looks my age, What'll you have, young lady? I did not answer him. If you say that to someone like me, it really means, What do you want, you pathetic old hag?”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“I am trying to curb my cultivated individualism, which seemed for years so sweet. It was my own song in my own world and, of course, it may not be useful in the hard time to come.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“I haven't needed to iron in years because of famous American science, which gives us wash-and-wear in one test tube and nerve gas in the other. Its right test tube doesn't know what its left test tube is doing.

Oh yes, it does, says Jack.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“They were all, even Edie, ideologically, spiritually, and on puritanical principle against despair.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“Sonia, tell me no or yes. Do you have a life?

Ha! she said. If you really want to know, read Dostoevsky. Then they all laughed and laughed.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“Who're you? he says.

I move the pots of marigold aside. Then I'm able to lean on my elbow way out into unshadowed visibility. Once, not too long ago, the tenements were speckled with women like me in every third window up to the fifth story, calling the children from play to receive orders and instruction. This memory enables me to say strictly, Young man, I am an older person who feels free because of that to ask questions and give advice.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“He saw my sad face and made one of the herb teas used by his peer group to calm their overwrought natures. He does want to improve my pretty good health and spirits. His friends have a book that says a person should, if properly nutritioned, live forever. He wants me to give it a try. He also believes that the human race, its brains and good looks, will end in his time.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“We're irritable, Susan explained to her new pal. We're angry with our friend Selena for dying. The reason is, we want her to be present when we're dying. We all require a mother or mother-surrogate to fix our pillows on that final occasion, and we were counting on her to be that person.

I know just what you mean, he said. You'd like to have someone around. A little fuss, maybe.

Something like that.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“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.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“Well, some bad things have happened in my life, I said.

What? You were born a woman? Is that it?”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“As is usual in conversations, I said a couple of things out loud and kept a few structured remarks for interior mulling and righteousness.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“Susan, you still have him-itis, the dread disease of females.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“We were, in fact, the soft-speaking tough souls of anarchy.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“A few hot human truthful words are powerful enough, Ann thinks, to steam all God's chemical mistakes and society's slimy lies out of her life.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“Joe Larsen chewed sugarless gum very hard. He walked around and around in a little circle of annoyance near the door.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“He is a tenderhearted but relentless person.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“What you mean is, Faith said, what you mean is--life has made you sick.

If that's what I mean, that's what I mean.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“Ugh, the stupidity of the beloved.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day