Paula Fox Quotes

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.

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

To be human is to be in a story.

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.

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

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

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.

Life is all getting used to what you're not used to.

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.

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

I was the goldfish that leapt out of the bowl.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Freedom is a public library.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Words are nets through which all truth escapes.

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

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