Paula Fox > Quotes

“The minute you become conscious that you are doing good, that's the minute you have to stop because from then on it's wrong.”
― Paula Fox

“When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.”
― Paula Fox

“You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening.”
― Paula Fox, The Slave Dancer

“A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.”
― Paula Fox

“‎How pleasant to read uncompromised by purpose.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“It was hard to reassure grown-ups when you weren't certain yourself what you were feeling and thinking—when thoughts dissolved before you could name them.”
― Paula Fox, The Village by the Sea

“Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.”
― Paula Fox

“There was no way to grasp the reality of the present which slid away each second, invisible as air; reality only existed after the fact, in one's vision of the past.”
― Paula Fox, The Widow's Children

“Deliberately, she visualized the living room of their Flynders farmhouse, then, blurring that bright familiar place, another room began to form: the skimpy parlor of her childhood, her father and a friend speaking late into the evening while she lay drowsily on the Victorian sofa, listening to the drone of the men's low voices, feeling on her cheek the sting of a horsehair which had worked its way up through the black upholstery, safe and dreaming of the brilliance of her own true grown-up life to come.

She put her hand on her cheek and touched the place where the horsehair had pricked, and she gasped at the force of a memory that could, in the space of a breath taken and released, expunge the distance between sleepy child and exhausted adult, as though, she thought, it had taken all these years to climb the stairs to bed.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“I imagine there's a timid animal inside me...When it's afraid, I feel it tremble. It can't hear. It only knows the fear it feels. It doesn't have memory or an idea of the future. It lives in the present—the right now—and I try to remember it is only a part of myself, a small frightened thing I can pity. When I'm able to do that, something happens. The animal grows less afraid.”
― Paula Fox, The Village by the Sea

“He smiled and bent forward, a hand on each knee, his truculence gleaming through his smile like a stone under water.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“She often told herself that story, easing herself into sleep, drifting off as she patched together the ghostly memory of someone in whose real existence she hardly believed any more.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“Families hold each other in an iron grip of definition. One must break the grip, somehow.”
― Paula Fox, The Widow's Children

“It was a dead hole, smelling of synthetic leather and disinfectant, both of which odors seemed to emanate from the torn scratched material of the seats that lined the three walls. It smelled of the tobacco ashes which had flooded the two standing metal ashtrays. On the chromium lip of one, a cigar butt gleamed wetly like a chewed piece of beef. There was the smell of peanut shells and of the waxy candy wrappers that littered the floor, the smell of old newspapers, dry, inky, smothering and faintly like a urinal, the smell of sweat from armpits and groins and backs and faces, pouring out and drying up in the lifeless air, the smell of clothes—cleaning fluids imbedded in fabric and blooming horribly in the warm sweetish air, picking at the nostrils like thorns—all the exudations of the human flesh, a bouquet of animal being, flowing out, drying up, but leaving a peculiar and ineradicable odor of despair in the room as though chemistry was transformed into spirit, an ascension of a kind,
…Light issuing from spotlights in the ceiling was sour and blinding like a sick breath.
There was in that room an underlying confusion in the function of the senses. Smell became color, color became smell. Mute started at mute so intently they might have been listening with their eyes, and hearing grew preternaturally acute, yet waited only for the familiar syllables of surnames. Taste died, mouth opened in the negative drowsiness of waiting.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“People like you…stubborn and stupid and drearily enslaved by introspection while the foundation of their privilege is being blasted out from under them.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“She'd been noticing the feet of colored people ever since she'd come south. "They've been pressed down to the earth so hard," she said. "And the weight of what they carry tortures their feet.”
― Paula Fox, The God of Nightmares

“Words are nets through which all truth escapes

("News From The World")”
― Paula Fox, Short Shorts

“You light a match and the house burns down.”
― Paula Fox, Poor George

“It's all that's left,' Leon said in a suddenly weak voice. 'It's what is left of civilization. You take raw material and you transform it. That is civilization. Physical love is all raw meat. That's why everyone's so preoccupied with it now. I have been told by a colleague ten years older than myself--as if it were possible for anybody to be ten years older than I am--that salvation comes from staring at the pubic region of strangers, and freedom, from inducing in myself, by the use of a chemical, the kind of ecstatic lunacy in which I spent most of my adolescence, a condition I attribute solely to the strength of my body at that time and the conviction I had then that I would see socialism in the United States during my lifetime. Now that my bones are weak, my brain is stronger. I don't expect . . . anything. But I cannot bear the grotesque, lying piety of my own unhinged contemporaries. One man, a literary star'--and here he broke off, laughed once, choked and shook his head--'oh, yes, a star, told me he only regretted the pill had not yet been developed in his own youth. All those girls who might have been his! In this age of generalized cock, is this the whole revelation toward which my life has been directed? I would, in any case, prefer to contemplate the organ of a horse. It is handsomer, larger and more comic than anything my fellow man has to show. It is the age of baby shit, darling. Don't kid yourself. My privacy has been violated--what I've admired and thought about all my life has been debased. Poor bodies . . . poor evil-smiling gross flesh. Perhaps we're going downhill, all of us.' He reached out and pressed her shoulder. 'Do you understand me?' he asked.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“She was thinking of the advantages she would have if only she were someone else.”
― Paula Fox, Poor George

“He would not say anything at all. Sometimes, over the years, that had happened, his not wanting to talk to her. It didn't mean he was angry. But sometimes, after a movie or a play or the company had gone home, he simply didn't want to talk to her, the kind of woman she was--Sophie--he thought about her, the kind of woman she was--and she was so tangled in his life that the time he had sensed she wanted to go away from him had brought him more suffering than he had conceived it possible for him to feel.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“When he had first known her, the violent decisiveness with which she judged people had charmed him. For Emma, people were enemies or protectors. Even though the charm had worn off, he sometimes envied her–her sense of others devoid of the kind of complex and enervating reflections he was given to–for within her limits she was clear while he, he thought, moved in a permanent blur.”
― Paula Fox, Poor George

“Life had been soft for so long a time, edgeless and spongy, and now, here in all its surface banality and submerged horror was this idiot event—her own doing—this undignified confrontation with mortality.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“Sophie, come here,' Mike said, and led her upstairs and into a large bedroom. A Greek rug covered the bed; a Mexican ceramic horse stood in front of the fireplace. On one of the bedside tables were piled paperback detective stories in their penny candy wrapper covers.
'Who reads those? You or Flo?'
'Me,' he replied, and he sighed and looked winsome. They're good for me. They ride roughshod over what I live with. Potent men. Palpitating women . . . a murderer's mind laid out like the contents of a child's pencil box.'
'You aren't reading the right ones.'
'The new ones are the old ones. That false complexity is just another kind of pencil box.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“People narrow to their choices said the other woman. That's not the same as changing.”
― Paula Fox, Poor George

“In the end you learned to live with things once you stopped talking about them.”
― Paula Fox, Poor George

“What is there to imagine with a gun?" asked Papa . . . .
"Something dead," Papa said more quietly. "That's what there is to imagine with a gun.”
― Paula Fox, One-Eyed Cat

“As he sat down, a man in the next booth cleared his throat violently. Then he said, 'Honesty is my God. Frankly, I wouldn't have lied to Hitler.'
There was a kind of female moan of assent. Sophie peered over the back of the booth and saw a woman, her head resting over the back of the booth and saw a woman, her head resting on one hand as though it had come loose from her neck.
'How do you know what Otto feels? What is it you want him to do? You and he have been fighting for years, haven't you? Like smiling people in a swimming pool, kicking each other under water.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“Do you think I'm only here when you look at me?”
― Paula Fox, Poor George

“The children aren't enough now. One constructs such a fine balance, you know, very fine, matchsticks in fact ...”
― Paula Fox, Poor George