Alison Lurie Quotes

#1. I can think of no other writer who so thoroughly embodies the Jamesian spirit as Alison Lurie. Like him she can excavate all the possibilities of a theme. Like his, her books seem long, unbroken threads, seamless progressions of effects.

Edmund White

#2. There's a rule, I think. You get what you want in life, but not your second choice too.

Alison Lurie

#3. Real literature, like travel, is always a surprise.

Alison Lurie

#4. You can't write well with only the nice parts of your character, and only about nice things. And I don't want even to try anymore. I want to use everything, including hate and envy and lust and fear.

Alison Lurie

#5. America has a history of political isolation and economic self-sufficiency; its citizens have tended to regard the rest of the world as a disaster area from which lucky or pushy people emigrate to the Promised Land.

Alison Lurie

#6. As one went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit Southern California to observe the future.

Alison Lurie

#7. Being 16 years old and getting an electric guitar is never going to get old. There's always going to be kids making music. There's always going to be kids in bands.

Dan Auerbach

#8. With a pencil and paper, I could revise the world.

Alison Lurie

#9. Grosvenor and Burke suggest that continually, though silently, a school building tells students who they are and how they should think about the world. It can help to manufacture rote obedience or independent activity; it can create high self-confidence or low self-esteem.

Alison Lurie

#10. In a sense much great literature is subversive, since its very existence implies that what matters is art, imagination, and truth. In what we call the real world, on the other hand, what usually counts is money, power, and public success.

Alison Lurie

#11. Painting fulfills a need to be non-intellectual. There are times when we have to get our brains out in our fingers.

Ray Bradbury

#12. The Sixties was a time of breaking down class barriers, although I think class still exists today in some areas.

David Bailey

#13. But I think that sometimes, when one's behaved like a rather second-rate person, the way I did at breakfast, then in a kind of self-destructive shock one goes and does something really second-rate. Almost as if to prove it ...

Alison Lurie

#14. We say something every morning when we decide how to dress.

Alison Lurie

#15. Even when we say nothing our clothes are talking noisily to everyone who sees us, telling them who we are, where we come from, what we like to do in bed and a dozen other intimate things ...

Alison Lurie

#16. I was kind of a loser at ballet school. It's all rich kids, and I was not a wealthy kid. I didn't have the Chanel butterfly clip everyone else did.

Sarah Hay

#17. Nature can seem cruel, but she balances her books.

Alison Lurie

#18. Many Americans think of the rest of the world as a kind of Disneyland, a showplace for quaint fauna, flora and artifacts. They dress for travel in cheap, comfortable, childish clothes, as if they were going to the zoo and would not be seen by anyone except the animals.

Alison Lurie

#19. There was no Delete button to help you erase an awkward scene. You couldn't hit Backspace to get rid of all the rubbishy bits. You had to live with the decisions you made.

Victoria Connelly

#20. The fashion industry is no more able to preserve a style that men and women have decided to abandon than to introduce one they do not choose to accept.

Alison Lurie

#21. If nothing will finally survive of life besides what artists report of it, we have no right to report what we know to be lies.

Alison Lurie

#22. The fashion pages of magazines such as Cosmopolitan now seem to specialize in telling the career girl what to wear to charm the particular wrong type of man who reads Playboy, while the editorial pages tell her how to cope with the resulting psychic damage.

Alison Lurie

#23. I've always been curious about why one man jumps out of a foxhole with a grenade and charges a machine gun nest, and his buddy next to him sits there cowering. And my feeling is that the difference is tiny between the two.

Stephen Lang

#24. We can lie in the language of dress or try to tell the truth; but unless we are naked and bald, it is impossible to be silent.

Alison Lurie

#25. Fashion is free speech, and one of the privileges, if not always one of the pleasures, of a free world

Alison Lurie

#26. This is a time of great confusion, of great darkness; other networks are slipping in through other dimensional planes. Soon the network of enlightenment will leave this earth.

Frederick Lenz

#27. We all want to be guilty, because guilt is power.

Alison Lurie

#28. There is a peculiar burning odor in the room, like explosives. the kitchen fills with smoke and the hot, sweet, ashy smell of scorched cookies. The war has begun.

Alison Lurie

#29. You get into the habit of being angry and hurt by life, and then when something good happens you can't accept it because it doesn't fit the pattern.

Alison Lurie

#30. Other wars end eventually in victory, defeat or exhaustion, but the war between men and women goes on forever.

Alison Lurie

#31. Though most tourists accepted the occasional comic misadventure, it was important to them that overall their vacation should be pleasant. When you spend money on a holiday you are essentially purchasing happiness: if you don't enjoy yourself you will feel defrauded.

Alison Lurie