Enormous Changes at the Last Minute Quotes

“There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.
Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.
He said, What? What life? No life of mine.”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“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.”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber’s snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, halfway to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment. What I mean is, I sat down on the library steps and he went away.”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“Who cares?' said Judy, who didn't care.”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“At this very moment, the thumb of Ricardo's hovering shadow jabbed her in her left eye, revealing for all the world the shallowness of her water table. Rice could have been planted at that instant on the terraces of her flesh and sprouted in strength and beauty in the floods that overwhelmed her from that moment on through all the afternoon. ”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“My dear, no one knows the power of good sense. It hasn’t been built up or experimented with sufficiently.”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“Still, it is like a long hopeless homesickness my missing those young days. To me, they're like my own place that I have gone away from forever, and I have lived all the time since among great pleasures but in a foreign town. Well, O.K. Farewell, certain years.”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“Well! I decided to bring those two books back to the library. Which proves that when a person or an event comes along to jolt or appraise me I CAN take some appropriate action, although I am better known for my hospitable remarks.”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“... plot, the absolute line between two points which I've always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“Despite no education, Mrs. Finn always is more in charge of word meanings than I am. She is especially in charge of Good and Bad. My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster’s or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“Happy!" He leaned over the rail and tried to hold her eyes. But that is hard to do, for eyes are born dodgers and know a whole circumference of ways out of a bad spot.

"Faith in the Afternoon”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories