Poor George Quotes

“You light a match and the house burns down.”
― Paula Fox, Poor George

“She was thinking of the advantages she would have if only she were someone else.”
― Paula Fox, Poor George

“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, Poor George

“Do you think I'm only here when you look at me?”
― Paula Fox, Poor George

“I've just begin to realize that the capacity to be interested is a luxury, you know? It gets handed down like property.”
― Paula Fox, Poor George

“In the end you learned to live with things once you stopped talking about them.”
― Paula Fox, Poor George

“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.”
― Paula Fox, Poor George

“Minnie's casseroles were bottomless. The guests grew stunned with food and wine. They could have been picked off with peashooters one by one.”
― Paula Fox, Poor George

“People narrow to their choices said the other woman. That's not the same as changing.”
― Paula Fox, Poor George

“Women like Joe. They fall for him in that between-trains way.”
― Paula Fox, Poor George

“You know there isn’t much to do in life once you fall though the surface of things.”
― Paula Fox, Poor George

“The children aren't enough now. One constructs such a fine balance, you know, very fine, matchsticks in fact ...”
― Paula Fox, Poor George

“And I don't go outside of the house if I can help it.”
― Paula Fox, Poor George

“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, Poor George

“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?”
― Paula Fox, Poor George

“Sometimes he though her coolness not so much a cover as the thing itself, an emptiness”
― Paula Fox, Poor George