Top 40 Paula Fox Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Paula Fox

2. “Life is all getting used to what you’re not used to.”

— Paula Fox

3. “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.”

— Paula Fox

4. “Freedom is a public library.”

— Paula Fox

5. “Words are nets through which all truth escapes.”

— Paula Fox

6. “A lie hides the truth. A story tries to find it.”

— Paula Fox

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

7. “Life was an impenetrable mystery cloaked in babble.”

— Paula Fox

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

— Paula Fox

9. “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.”

— Paula Fox

Featured in: Reading Quotes

10. “I was the goldfish that leapt out of the bowl.”

— Paula Fox

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

— Paula Fox

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

— Paula Fox

13. “You’ll see some bad things, but if you didn’t see them, they’d still be happening.”

— Paula Fox

14. “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.”

— Paula Fox

15. “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.”

— Paula Fox

16. “My life was incoherent to me. I felt it quivering, spitting out broken teeth.”

— Paula Fox

17. “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.”

— Paula Fox

18. “To be human is to be in a story.”

— Paula Fox

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

19. “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.”

— Paula Fox

20. “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.”

— Paula Fox

21. “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.”

— Paula Fox

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

— Paula Fox

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

— Paula Fox

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Paula Fox

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

— Paula Fox

26. “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.”

— Paula Fox

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Paula Fox

28. “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.”

— Paula Fox

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

— Paula Fox

30. “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.”

— Paula Fox

31. “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.”

— Paula Fox

32. “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.”

— Paula Fox

33. “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.”

— Paula Fox

34. “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.”

— Paula Fox

35. “You light a match and the house burns down.”

— Paula Fox

36. “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.”

— Paula Fox

37. “I don’t like to listen to music while I’m working.”

— Paula Fox

38. “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.”

— Paula Fox

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

— Paula Fox

40. “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.”

— Paula Fox

41. “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.”

— Paula Fox

42. “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.”

— Paula Fox