Alison Lurie Quotes

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

Having a chronic illness, Molly thought, was like being invaded. Her grandmother back in Michigan used to tell about the day one of their cows got loose and wandered into the parlor, and the awful time they had getting her out. That was exactly what Molly's arthritis was like: as if some big old cow had got into her house and wouldn't go away. It just sat there, taking up space in her life and making everything more difficult, mooing loudly from time to time and making cow pies, and all she could do really was edge around it and put up with it. When other people first became aware of the cow, they expressed concern and anxiety. They suggested strategies for getting the animal out of Molly's parlor: remedies and doctors and procedures, some mainstream and some New Age. They related anecdotes of friends who had removed their own cows in one way or another. But after a while they had exhausted their suggestions. Then they usually began to pretend that the cow wasn't there, and they preferred for Molly to go along with the pretense.

...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.

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.

As I walked by myself And talked to myself, Myself said unto me, Look to thyself, Take care of thyself, For nobody cares for thee.

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.

In this culture, where energy and egotism are rewarded in the young and good-looking, plain aging women are supposed to be self-effacing, uncomplaining--to take up as little space and breathe as little air as possible.

Of course some people say it is her own fault that she’s alone: that she is impossibly romantic, asks too much (or too little) of men, is unreasonably jealous, egotistical/a doormat; sexually insatiable/frigid; and so on—the usual things people say of any unmarried woman, as Vinnie well knows.

...in other spheres of Victorian Society the appeal of a young woman dressed in black from head to toe was acknowledged. In Victorian popular culture, widows had two manifestations: the battleaxe and the man-eater, preying upon husbands and bachelors alike. Even today, an attractive, dark-haired person dressed in all black has vampiric connotations, as the novelist Alison Lurie has noted, 'so archetypally terrifying and thrilling, that any black-haired, pale-complexioned man or woman who appears clad in all black formal clothes projects a destructive eroticism, sometimes without concious intention.

I love Flaubert. I just finished Sentimental Education and I was amazed by how contemporary it seemed. But I also love writers like Alison Lurie and Mary Gaitskill. And I grew up reading mysteries. I love Donald Westlake and Dashiell Hammett.

Brian knows the affair is wrong. He's known from the moment Wendy first undressed in his office. But with her hot, wet tongue in his ear, and her taut, pink nipples straining against his starched white shirt, and with Mick Jagger's strident voice squawking about satisfaction on the tiny transistor radio, Brian's body refuses to obey. Instead of shoving Wendy out the door, he shoves her onto the unmade bed.

It is a curious thing that people only ask if you are enjoying yourself when you aren't.

No entiendo por qué te empeñas en seguir escribiendo —me dijo una vez que estaba especialmente deprimida —. Da la impresión de que hacerlo te causa un enorme malestar.

In most novels it is taken for granted that people over fifty are as set in their ways as elderly apple trees, and as permanently shaped and scarred by the years they have weathered. The literary convention is that nothing major can happen to them except through subtraction.

early childhood she had given her deepest trust, and which for half a century has suggested what she might do, think, feel, desire, and become, has suddenly fallen silent. Now, at last, all those books have no instructions for her, no demands—because she is just too old. In the world of classic British fiction, the one Vinnie knows best, almost the entire population is under fifty, or even under forty—as was true of the real world when the novel was invented. The few older people—especially women—who are allowed into a story are usually cast as relatives; and Vinnie is no one’s mother, daughter, or sister. People over fifty who aren’t relatives are pushed into minor parts, character parts, and are usually portrayed as comic, pathetic, or disagreeable. Occasionally one will appear in the role of tutor or guide to some young protagonist, but more often than not their advice and example are bad; their histories a warning rather than a model. In most novels it is taken for granted that people over fifty are as set in their ways as elderly apple trees, and as permanently shaped and scarred by the years they have weathered. The literary convention is that nothing major can happen to them except through subtraction. They may be struck by lightning or pruned by the hand of man; they may grow weak or hollow; their sparse fruit may become misshapen, spotted, or sourly crabbed. They may endure these changes nobly or meanly. But they cannot, even under the best of conditions, put out new growth or burst into lush and unexpected bloom. Even today there are disproportionately few older characters in fiction. The

When things have gone wrong it is no consolation to hear that your friends expected it all along and could have told you so if they hadn't been so polite.

And if she is attacked and murdered

That’s what you think, my dear. You think a lot of men want to sleep with me. I used to think that myself.” Her voice alters. “Bloody little fool that I was. Men don’t want to sleep with me, they want to have slept with me.

She'd always disliked argument, which in her experience never convinced anyone--only facts did that, and even then not every often. Whenever she seriously disagreed with someone she repeated a phrase her father had taught her when she was fourteen: 'You may be right.

the fact that so many women writers are drawn to fairy-tale material is also part of a long and honorable historic tradition: folk tales and magical tales (like other largely anonymous arts) have long been associated with women. As Alison Lurie has pointed out (in her essay “Once Upon a Time”): “Throughout Europe (except in Ireland), the storytellers from whom the Grimm Brothers and their followers collected their material were most often women; in some areas they were all women. For hundreds of years, while written literature was almost exclusively the province of men, these tales were being invented and passed on orally by women.” For centuries, fairy tales have been the voice of disenfranchised populations: not only women, but also the old, the poor, and social outcasts (such as the Gypsies—famed throughout the world for their wealth of magical tales). Fairy tales speak covertly, symbolically, about the hard realities of life; and these symbols are proving as potent to artists today as in centuries past.

If she couldn't look like an attractive woman, she could look like a lady

As a result men—even men she has been intimate with—do not now gaze upon her with dismay, as upon a beloved landscape devastated by fire, flood, or urban development. They do not mind that Vinnie Miner, who was never much to look at, now looks old. After all, they hadn’t slept with her out of romantic passion, but out of comradeship and temporary mutual need—often almost absent-mindedly, to relieve the pressure of their desire for some more glamorous female. It wasn’t uncommon for a man who had just made love to Vinnie to sit up naked in bed, light a cigarette, and relate to her the vicissitudes of his current romance with some temperamental beauty-breaking off occasionally to say how great it was to have a pal like her

As has sometimes been remarked, almost any woman can find a man to sleep with if she sets her standards low enough. But what must be lowered are not necessarily standards of character, intelligence, sexual energy, good looks, and worldly achievement. Rather, far more often, she must relax her requirements for commitment, constancy, and romantic passion; she must cease to hope for declarations of love, admiring stares, witty telegrams, eloquent letters, birthday cards, valentines, candy, and flowers. No; plain women often have a sex life. What they lack, rather, is a love life.

Since this is not phrased as a question, Vinnie is not obliged to respond, and does not.

When at last she saw it she felt like the children in John Masefield’s The Box of Delights who discover that they can climb into the picture on their sitting-room wall. The landscape of her interior vision had become life-size and three-dimensional; she could literally walk into the country of her mind. From the first hour England seemed dear and familiar to her; London, especially, was almost an experience of déjà vu. She also felt that she was a nicer person there and that her life was more interesting.

As Vinnie listens to these facts, and under friendly interrogation supplies a few of her own, she wonders why citizens of the United States who have nothing in common and will never see one another again feel it necessary to exchange such information. It can only clog up their brain cells with useless data, and is moreover often invidious, tending to estrange casual acquaintances.

Soon she is panting, her heart pounding; she has to slow down. No doubt about it, she is getting older, weaker in body and in spirit.

Fred is not embarrassed by this attention. He is used to it, regards it as normal, doesn’t in fact realize that few other humans are gazed at so often or so intensely. Since babyhood his appearance has attracted admiration, and often comment. It was soon clear that he had inherited his mother’s brunette, lushly romantic good looks: her thick wavy dark hair, her wide-set cilia-fringed brown eyes (“wasted on a boy,” many remarked).

Since then, Roberto has collected women as he once collected baseball cards, always preferring quantity to quality: in grade school he once traded Mickey Mantle to Fred for three obscure and inept Red Sox. It is his contention that the world is full of good-looking horny women who are interested in a no-strings relationship.

Fred gets off to change at the Northern line, and so does the young woman in the green cape; he notices that she has been reading Joseph Conrad’s Chance. He quickens his pace, for he is a Conrad fan; then, uncertain of what he’s going to say to her, slows down. The young woman gives him a regretful backward glance as she turns toward the stairs to the southbound platform.

She is known to be eccentric and touchy, and is also a devout Anglophile. In any encounter Fred probably has more of a chance of alienating her than of pleasing her; and if he admits his depression and his dislike of London and of the British Museum, her opinion of him, whatever it may be now, will sink.

Of course that’s inevitable anywhere,” her husband explains. “Tourism is a self-degrading process, kind of like oxidation of iron.” Joe has a fondness for scientific metaphor, the precipitate of undergraduate years as a biochemistry major.

Fred is active, energetic, impatient of confinement. When he’s in a library he likes to range through the stacks finding the books he wants, and coming across others he hadn’t known about.

He doesn’t condemn the Vogelers for their opinion, since when he himself met Roo he also would have said they weren’t on the same wavelength, though in fact the signals she broadcast made him hum like a stereo amplifier.

She was not the sort of girl/woman they had expected Fred to become serious about, and their congratulations had been manifested in the conventional form of faint and damning praise.

Though he had known Roo for nearly three months at this point, Fred was still intoxicated with her—and not only sexually. As if she had been some mind-expanding drug, he was in a constant state of heightened awareness: what he saw seemed both strange and amazingly familiar.

Roo didn’t answer. But the question, he soon saw, was not a rhetorical one.

The battles that followed this private view were fierce, painful, and prolonged.

For nearly forty years Vinnie has suffered from the peculiar disadvantages of the woman born without physical charms. Even as a child she had a nondescript sort of face, which gave the impression of a small wild rodent: the nose sharp and narrow, the eyes round and rather too close-set, the mouth a nibbling slit. For the first eleven years of her life, however, her looks gave no one any concern. But as she approached puberty, first her suddenly anxious mother and then Vinnie herself attempted to improve upon her naturally meager endowments.

Indeed, it would be kinder to draw a veil over some of Vinnie’s later attempts at stylishness: her bony forty-year-old legs in an orange leather miniskirt; her narrow mouse’s face peering from behind teased hair and an oversized pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses.

Again Vinnie agrees, but in such a way as to make it clear that she does not choose to converse.

While the shadows of war darken over Singapore in Jim Farrell’s last completed novel, the atmosphere outside the cabin windows brightens. The damp grayness becomes suffused with gold; the plane, breaking through the cloudbank, levels off in sunlight over an expanse of whipped cream. Vinnie looks at her watch; they are halfway to London.

Within the last couple of years she has in a sense caught up with, even passed, some of her better-equipped contemporaries. The comparison of her appearance to that of other women of her age is no longer a constant source of mortification. She is no better looking than she ever was, but they have lost more ground.

However long the flight, Vinnie always tries to avoid striking up acquaintance with anyone, especially on transatlantic journeys. According to her calculations, there is far more chance of having to listen to some bore for seven-and-a-half hours than of meeting someone interesting—and after all, whom even among her friends would she want to converse with for so long?

He is living in the historic past, as he had planned and hoped to do—but not in eighteenth-century London. Instead he inhabits a more recent, private, and dismal era of his own history.

But Fred doesn’t believe that there is no real and desirable London. That city exists: he dwelt there for six months as a child often, and last week he revisited it. Though some of its landmarks have vanished, those that remain shimmer with meaning and presence as if benignly radioactive.

The main problem is, he thinks, that visitors to a foreign country are allowed the full use of only two of their five senses. Sight is permitted—hence the term “sightseeing.” The sense of taste is also encouraged, and even takes on a weird, almost sexual importance: consumption of the native food and drink becomes a highly charged event, a proof that you were “really there.” But hearing in the full sense is blocked. Intelligible foreign sounds are limited to the voices of waiters, shopkeepers, professional guides, and hotel clerks—plus snatches of dubiously “native” music. Above all, the sense of touch is frustrated; visible or invisible KEEP OFF signs appear on almost everything and everyone.

Some may be surprised to learn that there is this side to Professor Miner’s life. But it is a mistake to believe that plain women are more or less celibate. The error is common, since in the popular mind—and especially in the media — the idea of sex is linked with the idea of beauty.

Fred Turner knows, of course, that he is a handsome, athletic-looking young man, the type that directors employ to battle carnivorous vegetables.

Though patience is held to be a virtue most appropriate to women, especially aging women, Vinnie has always particularly disliked waiting for anything, and never does so if it can be avoided.

For the truth is that children’s literature is a poor relation in her department—indeed, in most English departments: a stepdaughter grudgingly tolerated because, as in the old tales, her words are glittering jewels of a sort that attract large if not equally brilliant masses of undergraduates.

Vinnie knows, of course, that she ought not to take it so hard. But she knows too that those who have no significant identity outside their careers—no spouse, no lover, no parents, no children—do take such things hard.

The pieces on clothes and beauty, on the other hand, she passes over rapidly. She has now no use for, and has never derived any benefit from, their advice.

Some may be surprised to learn that there is this side to Professor Milner's life. But it is a mistake to believe that plain women are more or less celibate. The error is common, since in the popular mind - and especially in the media - the idea of sex is linked with the idea of beauty.

Setting aside Vogue, she unfolds the newspaper. Gradually, the leisurely Times style, with its air of measured consideration and its undertone of educated irony, begins to calm her, as the voice of an English nanny might quiet a hurt, overwrought child.

ON A COLD BLOWY February day a woman is boarding the ten A.M. flight to London, followed by an invisible dog. The woman’s name is Virginia Miner: she is fifty-four years old, small, plain, and unmarried—the sort of person that no one ever notices, though she is an Ivy League college professor who has published several books and has a well-established reputation in the expanding field of children’s literature.

Roo was his red flag, his declaration of independence—and in the beginning, the less comfortable his family and more conventional friends were with her, the better pleased he was. Now he feels shamed and enraged to realize that they had judged her more accurately than he. His father, for instance, held the unspoken but clearly evident opinion that Roo was not a lady.

In spite of his innocuous appearance, and a manner that matches it—amused, offhand, self-deprecating—Edwin is a figure of power in the children’s book world and a formidable critic of both juvenile and adult literature: learned, sharp-witted, and, when he chooses, sharp-tongued.

Exactly.” Edwin gives the wide smile that increases his resemblance, noted before by Vinnie, to the Cheshire Cat.

Vinnie does not comment, but it occurs to her for the first time that for such an intelligent man Edwin is disgracefully plump and self-indulgent; that his pretense of dieting is ridiculous; and that his demand that his friends join in the charade is becoming tiresome.

As Edwin once said, social life is like alchemy: mixing foreign elements is dangerous.

Vinnie refrains from remarking that she at least is not looking for an undying passion; Edwin surely knows that by now.

she prefers to study in these quiet, elegantly shabby surroundings, which for her are agreeably haunted by the shades of writers past and the shapes of writers present.

The marriage is an emotional disaster, a failed adventure that has, inevitably, shrunk his view of himself and of the world; he is wiser, maybe, but at the expense of being that much sourer and sadder.

She is extremely pretty and charming; she also has a history of brief, impetuous, usually disastrous affairs.

Vinne sighs; she has a deep distrust of marriage, which in her observation has an almost irresistable tendency to turn friends and lovers into relatives, if not into foes.

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

transformed into a kind of

and said so. Their initial impressions of each other were

Not for the first time, he wonders why it is that married couples feel perfectly free to analyze the affairs of their unmarried friends; whereas if he were to make some comment on Joe and Debby’s relationship they would be righteously pissed-off.

Explorando mais a fundo, fiquei surpreso ao descobrir a escassez de livros que introduzem e discutem os temas morais na literatura infantil de uma maneira acessível a pais e professores. A própria Oxford University Press publicou introduções muito úteis à história da Literatura Infantil, como Literatura Infantil: Uma História Ilustrada e esplêndidas coleções editadas de Contos de Fadas e histórias infantis como Os Contos de Fadas Clássicos, de lona e Peter Opie e O Livro Oxford de Contos de Fadas Modernos, editado por Alison Lurie. Mas é difícil de encontrar livros que se preocupam com discutir o conteúdo e o significado dessas histórias sob a compreensão da criança e sob as preocupações dos pais e professores com a educação dos filhos e alunos como pessoas éticas.

Now you have more knowledge of yourself and the world; you are equipped to make choices, but there are none left to make

Now you have more knowledge of yourself and the world; you are equipped to make choices, but there are none left to make.

Sometimes Vinnie wonders why any woman ever gets into bed with any man. To take off all your clothes and lie down beside some unclothed larger person is a terribly risky business. The odds are stacked almost as heavily against you as in the New York state lottery. He could hurt you; he could laugh at you; he could take one look at your naked aging body and turn away in ill-concealed, embarrassed distaste. He could turn out to be awkward, selfish, inept—even totally incompetent. He could have some peculiar sexual hangup: a fixation on your underclothes to the exclusion of you, for instance, or on one sexual variation to the exclusion of all else. The risks are so high that really no woman in her right mind would take such a chance—except that when you do take such a chance you’re usually not in your right mind. And if you win, just as with the state lottery (which Vinnie also plays occasionally) the prize is so tremendous.

Though it has given her a livelihood and a reputation, not to mention these happy months in London, Vinnie has a bad conscience about her profession. The success of children’s literature as a field of study—her own success—has an unpleasant side to it. At times she feels as if she were employed in enclosing what was once open heath or common. First she helped to build a barbed-wire fence about the field; then she helped to pull apart the wildflowers that grow there in order to examine them scientifically. Ordinarily she comforts herself with the thought that her own touch is so light and respectful as to do little harm, but when she has to sit by and watch people like Maria Jones and Dr. Smithers dissecting the Queen Anne’s lace and wrenching the pink campion up by its roots, she feels contaminated by association.

As we leave the tribal culture of childhood behind, we lose contact with instinctive joy in self-expression: with the creative imagination, spontaneous emotion, and the ability to see the world as full of wonders.

and Excuse Me and Would You Mind If; the daylong restraint of the natural impulse to yawn, to sigh, to scratch her head or pass wind or take off her shoes. Then, there is the sense of being constantly, even if benevolently, observed, making it impossible to do anything odd or impulsive—go for a walk in the rain before breakfast, for instance, or get up at two A.M. to make herself a cup of cocoa and read Trollope—without provoking anxious inquiry. “Vinnie? What are you doing down there? Are you all right?

I'll tell you the truth, don't think I'm lying: I've to run backwards to keep from flying.

Sticks and stones may break my bones; But names will never hurt me When I die, then you'll cry for the names you called me.

blood, they would be back. Molly herself was one

verisimilitude