Quotes from Paula Fox

My mother said, neutrally, that other children in the neighborhood were able to amuse themselves; they didn't seem to need adults to be involved with their pastimes. With a disinclined air, she taught me how to play solitaire.

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.

How did he die?' 'He shot himself with an Italian pistol he'd bought in Rome just before he married her.

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.

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.

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

A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.

How pleasant to read uncompromised by purpose.

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.

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.

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.

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.

He smiled and bent forward, a hand on each knee, his truculence gleaming through his smile like a stone under water.

Families hold each other in an iron grip of definition. One must break the grip, somehow.

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.

Words are nets through which all truth escapes ("News From The World")

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.

You light a match and the house burns down.

People like you…stubborn and stupid and drearily enslaved by introspection while the foundation of their privilege is being blasted out from under them.

Imagination is conjunctive and unifying; the sour, habitual wars of the self are disjunctive and separating. When I begin a story at my desk, the window to my back, the path is not there. As I start to walk, I make the path.

I've done a Russian movie," Claire said. "Thank God they're still stuck in realism, Zola-crazy. Subtitling their films is like captioning a child's picture book.

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.

There's something flabby about teaching in a place like this," He said. "If you don't have to exert yourself once in a while, you begin–or at least I do–to feel like a headwaiter leading people to the second-best table.

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