Alison Lurie
Alison Lurie
Alison Lurieis an American novelist and academic. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1984 novel Foreign Affairs. Although better known as a novelist, she has also written numerous non-fiction books and articles, particularly on children's literature and the semiotics of dress...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 September 1926
CountryUnited States of America
hurt patterns pessimism
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.
sweet war smell
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.
truth lying artist
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.
self land america
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.
fun views ideas
Most of the great works of juvenile literature are subversive in one way or another: they express ideas and emotions not generally approved of or even recognized at the time; they make fun of honored figures and piously held beliefs; and they view social pretenses with clear-eyed directness, remarking - as in Andersen's famous tale - that the emperor has no clothes.
real literature surprise
Real literature, like travel, is always a surprise.
children views shopping
The great subversive works of children's literature suggest that there are other views of human life besides those of the shopping mall and the corporation. They mock current assumptions and express the imaginative, unconventional, noncommercial view of the world in its simplest and purest form. They appeal to the imaginative, questioning, rebellious child within all of us, renew our instinctive energy, and act as a force for change. This is why such literature is worthy of our attention and will endure long after more conventional tales have been forgotten.
guilt want guilty
We all want to be guilty, because guilt is power.
thinking choices want
There's a rule, I think. You get what you want in life, but not your second choice too.
girl fashion men
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.
nature book balance
Nature can seem cruel, but she balances her books.
war men forever
Other wars end eventually in victory, defeat or exhaustion, but the war between men and women goes on forever.
thinking self breakfast
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 ...
paper world pencils
With a pencil and paper, I could revise the world.