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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

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Alison Lurie
Age: 94 †
Born: 1926
Born: September 3
Died: 2020
Died: December 3
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Alison Stewart Lurie
Power
Literature
Counts
Matter
Call
Matters
Real
Success
Usually
Great
Sense
Imagination
Much
Art
Hand
World
Money
Public
Hands
Since
Subversive
Truth
Existence
Implies

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With a pencil and paper, I could revise the world.
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Fashion is free speech, and one of the privileges, if not always one of the pleasures, of a free world
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There's a rule, I think. You get what you want in life, but not your second choice too.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As one went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit Southern California to observe the future.
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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.
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We can lie in the language of dress or try ot tell the truth but unless we are naked and bald, it is impossible to be silent.
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Nature can seem cruel, but she balances her books.
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We say something every morning when we decide how to dress.
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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.
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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.
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Real literature, like travel, is always a surprise.
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Other wars end eventually in victory, defeat or exhaustion, but the war between men and women goes on forever.
Alison Lurie
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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
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We all want to be guilty, because guilt is power.
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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
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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.
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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