Quotes from Paula Fox

The truth about people had not much to do with what they said about themselves, or what others said about them.

The hairs on her chin were like little metal filings; they appeared to vibrate like antennae in search of prey.

You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening so you might as well.

He didn't know a thing about her, not even after ten years, but she loved the air of knowingness; the flattery that didn't obligate her. And she liked his somewhat battered face, the close-fitting English suits he bought from a London salesman who stopped at a mid-town hotel each year to take orders, the Italian shoes he said were part of his seducer's costume. He wasn't a seducer. He was remote. He was like a man preceded into a room by acrobats.

You always hated intellectuals because they made you feel like a Gentile poop!" "Intellectuals!" she cried. "Those dilettantes! Those self-aggrandizing fops!

Sometimes he though her coolness not so much a cover as the thing itself, an emptiness

And I don't go outside of the house if I can help it.

The children aren't enough now. One constructs such a fine balance, you know, very fine, matchsticks in fact ...

You know there isn't much to do in life once you fall though the surface of things.

Women like Joe. They fall for him in that between-trains way.

People narrow to their choices said the other woman. That's not the same as changing.

Minnie's casseroles were bottomless. The guests grew stunned with food and wine. They could have been picked off with peashooters one by one.

You don't know what you feel, he said sharply. That's what manners are for--to keep things going when one doesn't know.

In the end you learned to live with things once you stopped talking about them.

I've just begin to realize that the capacity to be interested is a luxury, you know? It gets handed down like property.

Do you think I'm only here when you look at me?

He was hanging up his suit. She watched him straighten the pants. "You ought to throw out the underwear you're wearing," she said. "It's about to fall apart." "I like it when they get so soft, after I've had them a long time.

At the back of the house, dogs imprisoned in small yards ran in circles. Telephone cables, electric wires, and clothes lines crossed and recrossed, giving the houses, light poles, and leafless trees the quality of a contour drawing, one continuous line.

When he sat on the Makepeace veranda, it was as if he'd gone to another country

There was nothing to imagine with a gun except something that was dead.

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.

Maybe he's not drunk. Maybe he's ill,' she said. 'He's drunk,' Otto said. 'Come along to bed.' 'How do you know?' 'Don't shout.' 'Can't you leave room for doubt? Maybe he's had an epileptic fit! A heart attack! You're so full of cunning, catching everyone out . . . the American form of wisdom! What if he is drunk! Isn't that bad enough!

Or that Isaac Porter bit his nails like a man playing a mouth organ?

More than the secret of the cat had drawn [Ned] to the nursing home. It was Mr. Scully himself. He'd known him, his habits, the things he knew how to do, the way he made his bread, the way he could get a fire started so quickly in the stove, the stories he told, the smile he gave Ned when he poured rum into his own tea, his memories of his long life.