34 Quotes by Alison Lurie

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.

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 ...

Attempts to limit female mobility by hampering locomotion are ancient and almost universal. The foot-binding of upper-class Chinese girls and the Nigerian custom of loading women's legs with pounds of heavy brass wire are extreme examples, but all over the world similar stratagems have been employed to make sure that once you have caught a woman she cannot run away, and even if she stays around she cannot keep up with you. ... Literally as well as figuratively modern women's shoes are what keeps Samantha from running as fast as Sammy.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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