Life & Wisdom Quote by Grace Paley

Paley’s line is a magician’s boast delivered in a deadpan New York whisper: she doesn’t just “see through” appearances, she sees through the very idea of the solid world until what’s left is an apparition. The slyness is in the reversal. Usually we talk about seeing through illusions to get to reality; Paley flips it, suggesting that the “real” is exactly what’s ghostly, fleeting, half-invented. That’s a writer’s claim, but it’s also a moral stance: the people we think we understand, the stories we tell about them, the political narratives we rely on, are always already haunted by what’s missing, misremembered, or suppressed.

The diction does a lot of work. “Often” keeps the sentence from turning mystical or grandiose; it’s a habit, not a revelation. “Things” is stubbornly ordinary, the kind of word you’d use in a kitchen argument or on a park bench, which makes the leap to “apparition” feel sharper. Paley loved that hinge between the everyday and the uncanny: the domestic scene that suddenly exposes a deeper loneliness, the casual conversation that reveals a whole social order.

Context matters. As a short-story writer and activist, Paley wrote in tight, talky realism while insisting on the unseen: immigrant histories, women’s interior lives, the costs of war, the alternate choices that polite society calls “impractical.” The subtext is a warning and an invitation: if you look hard enough, you’ll discover that certainty is the thinnest thing in the room, and the truest subjects are the ones that won’t fully sit still.