Best 37 quotes of Paula Fox on MyQuotes

Paula Fox

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    Paula Fox

    A lie hides the truth. A story tries to find it.

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    Paula Fox

    And what movies we saw! All the actors and actresses whose photographs I collected, with their look of eternity! Their radiance, their eyes, their faces, their voices, the suavity of their movements! Their clothes! Even in prison movies, the stars shone in their prison clothes as if tailors had accompanied them in their downfall.

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    Paula Fox

    A year and a half after the end of the war and the German occupation, Paris was muted and looked bruised and forlorn. Everywhere I went, I sensed the tracks of the wolf that had tried to devour the city. But Paris proved inedible, as it had been ever since its tribal beginnings on an island in the Seine, the Ile de la Cité.

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    Paula Fox

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

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    Paula Fox

    Freedom is a public library.

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    Paula Fox

    I don't know what makes a writer's voice. It's dozens of things. There are people who write who don't have it. They're tone-deaf, even though they're very fluent. It's an ability, like anything else, being a doctor or a veterinarian, or a musician.

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    Paula Fox

    If a person had accused him of meanness, he could have defended himself. But with a dog - you did something cheap to it when you were sure no one was looking, and it was as though you had done it in front of a mirror.

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    Paula Fox

    I have a painter's memory. I can remember things from my childhood which were so powerfully imprinted on me, the whole scene comes back.

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    Paula Fox

    I like to cook; it is, for me, a happy combination of mindlessness and purpose.

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    Paula Fox

    Imagination has to do with one's awareness of the reality of other people as well as of one's own reality. Imagination is a bridge between the provincialism of the self and the great world.

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    Paula Fox

    In my early twenties, that's when I really began to write. Before that, I was too busy working, keeping myself going.

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    Paula Fox

    I taught writing classes at the University of Pennsylvania for a number of years and I realized that all you can do is encourage people and give them assignments and hope they will write them.

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    Paula Fox

    I've always known a lot of very bad people, destructive, brutes of a certain kind. Then I've seen these lovely impulses and what not, and they've stayed with me and comforted me.

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    Paula Fox

    I was the goldfish that leapt out of the bowl.

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    Paula Fox

    Labels not only free us from the obligation to think creatively; they numb our sensibilities, our power to feel. During the Vietnam War, the phrase body count entered our vocabulary. It is an ambiguous phrase, inorganic, even faintly sporty. It distanced us from the painful reality of corpses, of dead, mutilated people.

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    Paula Fox

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

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    Paula Fox

    My father brought me a box of books once when I was about three and a half or four. I remember the carton they were in and the covers with illustrations by Newell C. Wyeth.

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    Paula Fox

    My first job was working in a dress shop in Los Angeles in 1940, for $7 a week.

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    Paula Fox

    People steal into one's consciousness and occupy what seems, in retrospect, to have been their place all along.

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    Paula Fox

    Teachers inspire the smallest hearts to grow big enough to change the world.

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    Paula Fox

    The density of people in society is so thick that we forget that life will end one day. And we don't know when that one-day will be. So please, tell the people you love and care for that they are special and important. Tell them, before it is too late.

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    Paula Fox

    The language of labels is like paper money, issued irresponsibly, with nothing of intrinsic value behind it, that is, with no effort of the intelligence to see, to really apprehend.

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    Paula Fox

    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.

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    Paula Fox

    There's a certain amount of tyranny in all of us to some extent, and in some people it's much more developed than in others. It's a different balance which makes us all different.

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    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.

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    Paula Fox

    The truth came slowly like a story told by people interrupting each other.

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    Paula Fox

    we are, in this country, more open to new ideas. But we are also, it seems to me, more inclined to hail the new as absolute truth - until the next new comes along.

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    Paula Fox

    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.

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    Paula Fox

    When I had a few francs, I spent them at a café on the Place de Longchamps, a block or so from my pension, where I could order a glass of Beaujolais and a plate of string beans in vinaigrette for the equivalent of fifteen cents.

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    Paula Fox

    When there's a terrible murder people who are interviewed say, 'This has always been a quiet neighborhood.' That is so dumb and uninformed! The earth is not a quiet neighborhood. There isn't anyplace that's a quiet neighborhood. People are asking themselves how to stay neat in the cyclone.

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    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.

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    Paula Fox

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

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    Paula Fox

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

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    Paula Fox

    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.

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    Paula Fox

    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.

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    Paula Fox

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

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    Paula Fox

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