Virginia Postrel Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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The voice doesn't take a lot of effort now, but in the beginning it was hard to try to find a voice. The one I settled on was just easier to do for a half-hour.
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The moral of a fable is eternal. The moral of a story is temporary to a story.
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I feel quite connected to the past, and my memory. Everything that I've ever done I can still relate to, and feel connected to it in a way. There's no part of my life that I look at and go, 'I don't recognize that person at all.'
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I tried to take seriously the idea that if you tortured language you might arrive at some new truth. Later it became clear to me that I was retreading ground by fighting the literary battles of the 1950s and 1960s, and that I was actually a bit bored by some of the books I professed to love.
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The entertainment business is not the be-all and end-all for me.
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We don't have access to a national forum that we had in those days, through the news magazines which were the television news of the time. It's very disturbing to me that we've sort of been pushed to the corners.
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Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
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The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian but an American.
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Fair treatment of human beings and animals in many different realms strikes a chord with me.
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The Swiss can be very difficult.
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You can not only do great things for an urban core by moving your employee base there, you're also going to be a better business.
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The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.
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I've sat down and written with a more or less supportable or insupportable idea or thing to say, and it ends. When it's not 200 pages, people want to call it a story. I guess they're entitled to do that. In my view, if it were a supportable idea, it would have gone 200 pages, and it didn't.
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Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.
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Some days I totally appreciate everything that's happening to me, and some days I feel everyone's waiting for me to mess up.
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I've been very, very careful to tell people what I am qualified to talk about and what I'm not qualified to talk about.
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I think really, China, Chinese, I think they really have a long history of civilization, rich culture.
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It might seem unfair to reward a person for having so much pleasure over the years, asking the maize plant to solve specific problems and then watching its responses.
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One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.
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Yes, I am a lingerie model, but I have class.
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Berta, whose boyfriend had walked so far to see her, went out without her star and was immediately arrested and sent to a concentration camp.
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Avoid any specific discussion of public policy at public meetings.
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The mobile middle class gravitates to the cities where housing is affordable.
