List of Alison Lurie Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

Real Literature, Like Travel, Is Always A Surprise.

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.

Other Wars End Eventually In Victory, Defeat Or Exhaustion, But The War Between Men And Women Goes On Forever.

Nature Can Seem Cruel, But She Balances Her Books.

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.

There's A Rule, I Think. You Get What You Want In Life, But Not Your Second Choice Too.

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.

We All Want To Be Guilty, Because Guilt Is Power.