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

Paula Fox

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Paula Fox
Age: 93 †
Born: 1923
Born: April 22
Died: 2017
Died: March 1
Novelist
Translator
Writer
New York City
New York
Teeth
Broken
Felt
Life
Incoherent
Quivering
Spitting

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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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A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.
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The truth came slowly like a story told by people interrupting each other.
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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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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.
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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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Words are nets through which all truth escapes.
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Freedom is a public library.
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Life was an impenetrable mystery cloaked in babble.
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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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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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Families hold each other in an iron grip of definition. One must break the grip, somehow.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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I like to cook it is, for me, a happy combination of mindlessness and purpose.
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