Life & Wisdom Quote by Grace Paley

The line lands like a deadpan confession, but it’s really a miniature manifesto about how intelligence gets mislabeled once it stops being convenient. “Fantastic student” signals the kind of praise adults hand out when a child performs on cue: neat work, right answers, pleasing compliance. Then comes the quiet pivot - “until ten” - an age marker that feels almost absurdly specific, like Paley is mocking the bureaucracy of childhood evaluation. As if curiosity can be timestamped.

“My mind began to wander” carries the subversive charge. Wandering is framed as failure in school-speak, but in a writer’s mouth it’s the origin story: attention slipping away from the sanctioned lesson toward the messy, unsponsored world where stories actually live. Paley’s fiction is famously crowded with voices, arguments, interruptions - the textures of city life and domestic talk. This quote sketches the moment she switches allegiance from institutional order to lived experience.

The intent isn’t to romanticize bad grades; it’s to puncture the moralism baked into “good student” narratives. Paley implies that the education system rewards early mimicry and then punishes the very mental roaming that later gets celebrated as imagination. There’s also a sly class-and-immigrant undertone in how schooling functions as a gatekeeper: you’re “fantastic” when you assimilate smoothly, “wandering” when you start noticing the seams.

It works because it’s modest on the surface, almost throwaway, while smuggling in a critique of how society trains children to confuse obedience with aptitude - and calls the first stirrings of independent perception a problem to be corrected.