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.

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.

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")

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

She was thinking of the advantages she would have if only she were someone else.

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.

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.

You yearn for what was. You're a dead guy's daughter, thoroughly, you understand Paula Fox and you aspire to make sense of all things Old West. Which makes your settling, even temporary in New York a self destructive move. You're compassionate, you wrote about old actors because of the photography books in your apartment, so many pictures of places you can't go because they aren't there anymore. You're a romantic, searching for Coney Island, minus and drug dealers and the gum wrappers, and an innocent California where real cowboys and fake cowboys traded stories over cups of coffee they called Joe. You want to go places you can't go.

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.

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.

The usual short story cannot have a complex plot, but it often has a simple one resembling a chain with two or three links. The short short, however, doesn't as a rule have even that much - you don't speak of a chain when there's only one link. ... Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short. Everything depends on intensity, one sweeping blow of perception. In the short short the writer gets no second chance. Either he strikes through at once or he's lost. And because it depends so heavily on this one sweeping blow, the short short often approaches the condition of a fable. When you read the two pieces by Tolstoy in this book, or I.L. Peretz's 'If Not Higher,' or Franz Kafka's 'The Hunter Gracchus,' you feel these writers are intent upon 'making a point' - but obliquely, not through mere statement. What they project is not the sort of impression of life we expect in most fiction, but something else: an impression of an idea of life. Or: a flicker in darkness, a slight cut of being. The shorter the piece of writing, the more abstract it may seem to us. In reading Paz's brilliant short short we feel we have brushed dangerously against the sheer arbitrariness of existence; in reading Peretz's, that we have been brought up against a moral reflection on the nature of goodness, though a reflection hard merely to state. Could we say that the short short is to other kinds of fiction somewhat as the lyric is to other kinds of poetry? The lyric does not seek meaning through extension, it accepts the enigmas of confinement. It strives for a rapid unity of impression, an experience rendered in its wink of immediacy. And so too with the short short. ... Writers who do short shorts need to be especially bold. They stake everything on a stroke of inventiveness. Sometimes they have to be prepared to speak out directly, not so much in order to state a theme as to provide a jarring or complicating commentary. The voice of the writer brushes, so to say, against his flash of invention. And then, almost before it begins, the fiction is brought to a stark conclusion - abrupt, bleeding, exhausting. This conclusion need not complete the action; it has only to break it off decisively. Here are a few examples of the writer speaking out directly. Paz: 'The universe is a vast system of signs.' Kafka in 'First Sorrow': The trapeze artist's 'social life was somewhat limited.' Paula Fox: 'We are starving here in our village. At last, we are at the center.' Babel's cossack cries out, 'You guys in specs have about as much pity for chaps like us as a cat for a mouse.' Such sentences serve as devices of economy, oblique cues. Cryptic and enigmatic, they sometimes replace action, dialogue and commentary, for none of which, as it happens, the short short has much room. There's often a brilliant overfocussing. ("Introduction")

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.

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.

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.

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.

Look, there's a place open,' she said. 'What do you mean, moral failure? He's like most people.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Suddenly drained of the nervous excitement which had made her forget momentarily her tiredness and the monochromatic dullness of this early morning, she buried her face in the edge of the bed. Otto, somewhat apathetically, began to stroke her bag beneath her nightgown. She was grateful that they had not fought—she didn't have the energy—but a sullen disappointment roiled about just behind her gratitude. Was Otto going to make love to her while the Negro in the street slept in his own vomit?

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

Dust billowed around us, creeping under our loose-tied handkerchiefs and into our noses and mouths. It was fine and silty, red as ochre or the brush-tailed fox,

What would it matter if it was only three days? Misery hasn’t got to do with clocks. “I won’t let him

Ned was at once reminded of the past, the time before his mother had become ill. He imagined the three of them dancing down the living room holding hands, or skipping stones down by the Hudson River on a little muddy strip of shore where cattails grew and large damp toads hid behind rocks and the days were always sunny. He knew it couldn't have been like that; he knew it must have rained and stormed, that they hadn't spent all their time dancing and skipping stones and laughing together, yet it felt as though they had. It was the time he'd been happy and hadn't known it. When he was happy now, he would remind himself he was. He would say, At this moment I'm happy, and that was different from simply being a certain way and not having to give it a name.

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.

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

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.

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.

One manor house remained unoccupied and unsold. It sat on a small rise, a menacing, ugly house, a barrow, deposited and deserted by some 1920’s millionaire and left there to testify to the power of money to create a permanent and quarrelsome unloveliness.

He had, she remembered thinking, a certain kind of self-love, the kind that comes from poverty, perhaps, having nothing else to love. He was very poor, except for ex-wives, of which he had several, and he had many theories of how to manage a life which he described with the calm zealotry of one who has received truths from the sun.

Think, she commanded her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Then she covered her face with a cream that had cost $25 for four ounces. She observed the terrible and irreversible vigor of the white hairs that thrust their coarse way among the black hairs. Her mouth was softening, spreading into ambiguity; the sharp outline of her chin was being erased by a subtle pouching of the flesh. She wiped off the cream and washed her face roughly with soap. When she looked back once more into the mirror, cleansed, her cheeks and forehead naked as a body can be naked, she smiled winningly, hoping to forestall some judgment against herself that she felt forming in the wake of her investigation of her fading surface. But the judgment—whatever it had been—slipped away before she could grasp it. What she saw, for an instant, were her father’s defeated energies in her eyes, and mixed with that, the insistent force of her mother’s lineaments, all transformed mysteriously into herself. She touched the glass, finger on glass finger.

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

Most people like cheap mysteries and most people have never heard of Paula Fox or Hannah

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

Paula Fox was Courtney Love’s maternal grandmother.

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.

The cat had begun to clean its whiskers. Sophie caressed its back again, drawing her fingers along until they met the sharp furry crook where the tail turned up. The cat’s back rose convulsively to press against her hand. She smiled, wondering how often, if ever before, the cat had felt a friendly human touch, and she was still smiling as the cat reared up on its hind legs, even as it struck her with extended claws, smiling right up to that second when it sank its teeth into the back of her left hand and hung from her flesh so that she nearly fell forward, stunned and horrified, yet conscious enough of Otto’s presence to smother the cry that arose in her throat as she jerked her hand back from that circle of barbed wire. She pushed out with her other hand, and as the sweat broke out on her forehead, as her flesh crawled and tightened, she said, “No, no, stop that!” to the cat, as if it had done nothing more than beg for food, and in the midst of her pain and dismay she was astonished to hear how cool her voice was. Then, all at once, the claws released her and flew back as though to deliver another blow, but then the cat turned—it seemed in mid-air—and sprang from the porch, disappearing into the shadowed yard below.

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

Behind their cardboard menus their glances raced from entree to price. The waitress stood next to their table; her red arms bulged at the sleeve endings of her uniform, as though she were slowly growing out of it. The plastic mats, the hurricane lamp, the soiled pretentious menu, the waitress with her expression of patience in a hurry, and the humble clotted ketchup dispenser were the elements of a set piece to which they returned again and again. How could he have told her of their thousand evenings of the same entertainments without reference to these tangible manifestations of tedium and habit?

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?

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.

Dan Fox. (Son of Dan Brown and Paula Fox).

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!