Paula Fox Quotes

A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.

I think that everything in this life is a story you know; our own narrative, our own history, it's all a story.

What do you know about yourself? What are your stories? The ones you tell yourself, and the ones told by others. All of us begin somewhere. Though I suppose the truth is that we begin more than once; we begin many times. Over and over, we start our own tales, compose our own stories, whether our lives are short or long. Until at last all our beginnings come down to just one end, and the tale of who we are is done.

To me and my kind life itself is a story and we have to tell it in stories - that is the way it falls.

We breathe, we think, we conceive of our lives as narratives.

People like to see their lives mythologized in some way.

For many human beings, an interest in the past starts with themselves. That is, in part, a result of biology. Like other creatures, humans have a beginning and an ending, and in between lies their story.

People are the story they tell themselves.

A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.

I think in a way, what it is to be human is to transcend our boundaries. That is the human story.

What else are our lives but a story we tell ourselves to find some sense in the pain ofliving?

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but — mainly — to ourselves.

I tell a story, and therefore I exist.

People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song.

We are creatures of story.

There's no victory-condition for being human.

Our stories are the tellers of us.

The truth of the matter was stories was everything and everything was stories. Everybody told stories. It was a way of saying who they were in the world. It was their understanding of themselves. It was letting themselves know how they believed the world worked, the right way and the way that was not so right.

A movie that's about other horror movies isn't interesting. A movie about who we are, is.

Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

No matter where we are or how advanced we think we are, there are elemental issues of our civilization that stories help us work through.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

There is only one type of story in the world-your story.

I see myself as anybody, as everybody; I'm not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.