Just As I Thought Quotes

“Remembering is organized for significance (not usefulness)”
― Grace Paley, Just As I Thought

“The abortion isn’t what they(conservative pro-life men of 1940s) are thinking
about; they’re really thinking about sex. They’re really thinking
about love and reducing it to its most mechanical aspects—that is to
say, the mechanical fact of intercourse as a specific act to make
children in this world, and thinking of its use in any other way as
wrong and wicked. They are determined to reduce women’s normal sexual
responses, to end them, really, when we’ve just had a couple of
decades of admitting them.”
― Grace Paley, Just As I Thought

“By love, she probably meant she would die without being in love. 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, or nearly drowned to the
knees by the salty spring that seems to beat for years on our vaginal
shores. Not to omit all sorts of imaginings which assure great
spiritual energy for months and, when luck follows truth, years.”
― Grace Paley, Just As I Thought

“I finally understood that I didn’t lack pen and paper but my own
memorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, called
rote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking,
a great human gift disowned.”
― Grace Paley, Just As I Thought

“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, or nearly drowned to the knees by the salty spring that seems to beat for years on our vaginal shores. Not to omit all sorts of imaginings which assure great spiritual energy for months and, when luck follows truth, years.”
― Grace Paley, Just As I Thought

“retrospective smartness,”
― Grace Paley, Just As I Thought

“My daughter has pointed out that there were not enough lovejobs to go around in this new world. In any event, I probably learned tolerance, maybe even literary affection for the person in the wrong historical moment, living such long, never to be mediate wars with other sufferers.”
― Grace Paley, Just As I Thought

“In a way he was lucky. He was a member of a generation that thought it
was a good, even joyous, political idea to put its brains, energy,
labor at the service of the people.”
― Grace Paley, Just As I Thought

“Since I was a big reader, I might be able to accomplish something. I
had no gift. That didn’t mean I must be a deprived person. Besides,
why had the Enlightenment poured its seductive light all across the
European continent right into the poor endangered households of
Ukrainian Jews? Probably, my mother thought, so that a child, any
child (even a tone-deaf one), could be given a chance despite genetic
deficiency to become, in my mother’s embarrassed hopeful world, a
whole person.”
― Grace Paley, Just As I Thought