Desperate Characters Quotes

“‎How pleasant to read uncompromised by purpose.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“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.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“He smiled and bent forward, a hand on each knee, his truculence gleaming through his smile like a stone under water.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“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, Desperate Characters

“People like you…stubborn and stupid and drearily enslaved by introspection while the foundation of their privilege is being blasted out from under them.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“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.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“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.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“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.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“What are you thinking about?" she asked him.
"Oh, my father again. When he was in the room, we all watched what we said. You wouldn't have liked him. He didn't care what people talked about as long as they spoke to the point. And a subject had to be completed before a new one was begun. Thoughts had to be ordered, like boxcars on a track. You could not, when describing a summer in Paris, begin to speak about Istanbul."
"What if you did?"
"He had very prominent knuckles and they would turn white. A change in subject until =he= thought it had terminated, offended some inner sense of progression. It enraged him. In a similar way, if you were a chemist you could not speak of atonality. You might say you liked it. But no judgments.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“A llama bit me once," said Leon in a dreamy voice. "I reluctantly took Benny to the children's zoo when he was small--it was supposed to be the thing to do--and a dirty demented llama reached over the fence and clampted its jaws on my hand. It was like being bitten by dirty laundry.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“The truth about people had not much to do with what they said about themselves, or what others said about them.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“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.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“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.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“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.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

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

“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.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“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.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“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.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“The hairs on her chin were like little metal filings; they appeared to vibrate like antennae in search of prey.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“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.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“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.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“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!”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“How did he die?'
'He shot himself with an Italian pistol he'd bought in Rome just before he married her.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“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.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“Look, there's a place open,' she said. 'What do you mean, moral failure? He's like most people.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“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.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“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, Desperate Characters

“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?”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters