Alison Lurie

America has a history of political isolation and economic self-sufficiency; its citizens have tended to regard the rest of the world as…

— Alison Lurie

You get into the habit of being angry and hurt by life, and then when something good happens you can't accept it…

— Alison Lurie

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

— Alison Lurie

We can lie in the language of dress or try ot tell the truth; but unless we are naked and bald, it…

— Alison Lurie

There is a peculiar burning odor in the room, like explosives. the kitchen fills with smoke and the hot, sweet, ashy smell…

— Alison Lurie

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

— Alison Lurie

Grosvenor and Burke suggest that continually, though silently, a school building tells students who they are and how they should think about…

— Alison Lurie

Many Americans think of the rest of the world as a kind of Disneyland, a showplace for quaint fauna, flora and artifacts.…

— Alison Lurie

The fashion industry is no more able to preserve a style that men and women have decided to abandon than to introduce…

— Alison Lurie

If nothing will finally survive of life besides what artists report of it, we have no right to report what we know…

— Alison Lurie

Real literature, like travel, is always a surprise.

— Alison Lurie

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

— Alison Lurie

“In most novels it is taken for granted that people over fifty are as set in their ways as elderly apple trees,…

— Alison Lurie

Attempts to limit female mobility by hampering locomotion are ancient and almost universal. The foot-binding of upper-class Chinese girls and the Nigerian…

— Alison Lurie

“Having a chronic illness, Molly thought, was like being invaded. Her grandmother back in Michigan used to tell about the day one…

— Alison Lurie

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

— Alison Lurie

“It was lucky for Fred that he had already published two solid articles and was in the eighteenth century, where good candidates…

— Alison Lurie

Nature can seem cruel, but she balances her books.

— Alison Lurie

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

— Alison Lurie

But I think that sometimes, when one's behaved like a rather second-rate person, the way I did at breakfast, then in a…

— Alison Lurie

Most of the great works of juvenile literature are subversive in one way or another: they express ideas and emotions not generally…

— Alison Lurie

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

— Alison Lurie

When other people first became aware of the cow, they expressed concern and anxiety. They suggested strategies for getting the animal out…

— Alison Lurie

“transformed into a kind of”

— Alison Lurie

“Brian knows the affair is wrong. He's known from the moment Wendy first undressed in his office. But with her hot, wet…

— Alison Lurie