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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Virginia Postrel Quotes

Though designed as a mere convenience, clothing sizes establish an unintended norm, an ideal from which deviations seem like flaws. There’s nothing like a trip to the dressing room to convince a woman – fat, thin, or in between – that she’s a freak.

– Virginia Postrel

‘The Matrix’ is a movie that is all about glamour. I could do a whole talk on ‘The Matrix’ and glamour. It was criticized for glamorizing violence, because, look – sunglasses and those long coats, and, of course, they could walk up walls and do all these kinds of things that are impossible in the real world.

– Virginia Postrel

Like the skyscraper, the automobile, and the motion-picture palace, neon signs once symbolized popular hopes for a new era of technological achievement and commercial abundance. From the 1920s to the 1950s, neon-lit streets pulsed with visual excitement from Vancouver to Miami.

– Virginia Postrel

The innovative process is a fragile one, dependent on a complex, often messy interplay of imagination, competition, and exchange. Curbing new ideas hurts not only individual creators but the audience for which they create and the posterity that inherits their legacy.

– Virginia Postrel

Society needs both parents and nonparents, both the work party and the home party. While raising children is the most important work most people will do, not everyone is cut out for parenthood. And, as many a childless teacher has proved, raising kids is not the only important contribution a person can make to their future.

– Virginia Postrel

Viewers don’t care how big media companies are. They care whether they can dump those they don’t like, whether because of lousy service or because of crummy shows.

– Virginia Postrel

If you default on your Visa bill, nobody comes to repossess your refrigerator or auction off your shoes. The biggest penalty you’ll face is trouble getting future credit.

– Virginia Postrel

I think glamour has a genuine appeal, has a genuine value. I’m not against glamour. But there’s a kind of wonder in the stuff that gets edited away in the cords of life.

– Virginia Postrel

We’ve gone from a world in which Starbucks set a cutting-edge standard for mass-market design to a world in which Starbucks establishes the bare minimum. If your establishment can’t come up with an original look, customers expect at least some sleek wood fixtures, nicely upholstered chairs, and faux-Murano glass pendant lights.

– Virginia Postrel

For designers, the rigidity of an alphabet presents a never-ending artistic challenge: How do you do something new and still preserve the letters’ essential forms?

– Virginia Postrel

Clothing creates the illusion that bodies fit an aesthetically pleasing norm. And that illusion depends on getting the fit right. Garments that bunch, pull, or sag call attention to figure flaws and often make people look worse than they would without clothes.

– Virginia Postrel

Traditional PCs face competition from specialty products like Palm Pilots and from the servers that provide the nodes in computer networks. Microsoft’s Windows CE hasn’t done too well in the specialty-device market, and its Windows NT faces strong competition for server customers.

– Virginia Postrel

Although people often equate them, glamour is not the same as beauty, stylishness, luxury, celebrity, or sex appeal. It is not limited to fashion or film; nor is it intrinsically feminine. It is not a collection of aesthetic markers – a style, as fashion and design use the word.

– Virginia Postrel

The evergreen story of people in debt becomes even sexier in an economic downturn, when debts inevitably get harder to pay.

– Virginia Postrel

The profusion of fonts is one more product of the digital revolution. Beginning in the mid-’80s and accelerating in the 1990s, type design weathered the sort of radical, technology-driven transformation that other creative industries, including music, publishing, and movies, now face.

– Virginia Postrel

Science is about exploring the unknown and cannot offer guarantees.

– Virginia Postrel

Our eyes and brains pretty consistently like some human forms better than others. Shown photos of strangers, even babies look longer at the faces adults rank the best-looking.

– Virginia Postrel

As borrowers, we may feel guilty about running up debt, anxious about making payments, and resentful of the constraints that old obligations (and old credit records) impose on our current choices. We may find it too easy to buy things we may later regret.

– Virginia Postrel

‘Frankenstein’ did not invent the fear of science; the novel found its audience because it dramatized anxieties that already existed. Although popular entertainment can, over the long run, shape public perceptions, it becomes popular in the first place only if it addresses preexisting hopes, fears, and fascinations.

– Virginia Postrel

Habituation is indeed a fact of human psychology. That’s one reason we like novelty, including different cuts of jeans.

– Virginia Postrel

Abundant choice doesn’t force us to look for the absolute best of everything. It allows us to find the extremes in those things we really care about, whether that means great coffee, jeans cut wide across the hips, or a spouse who shares your zeal for mountaineering, Zen meditation, and science fiction.

– Virginia Postrel

In a media culture, we not only judge strangers by how they look but by the images of how they look. So we want attractive pictures of our heroes and repulsive images of our enemies.

– Virginia Postrel

The whole point of movie glamour was – and is – escape.

– Virginia Postrel

Internet pharmacies return to consumers the choice promised by supporters of the 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. That law established federal requirements for drug safety and labeling but exempted prescription medicines from the labeling rules.

– Virginia Postrel

When credit is cheaper to use and easier to arrange, people do use more of it.

– Virginia Postrel

The Elgin Marbles were supposed to be on the Parthenon. For many works of art, a museum is an artificial setting – a zoo, not a natural habitat.

– Virginia Postrel

Our demand for good looks, expressed in the biting comments that ensue when public figures fall short of perfection, puts enormous pressures on these individuals and may screen out the otherwise qualified. If video killed the radio star, it may also be doing away with the homely politician.

– Virginia Postrel

The children who are ‘our future’ will inherit a world created not just by parental devotion but by the sort of zealous, focused endeavors that can preclude good parenting.

– Virginia Postrel

More than two decades after the birth of Louise Brown, and all the hysteria that surrounded her ‘test tube’ conception, we should know that institutions, not technologies, create dystopias. Artificially conceived children are everywhere, beloved by their parents, and they haven’t radically altered our world.

– Virginia Postrel

The elements that create glamour are not specific styles – bias-cut gowns or lacquered furniture – but more general qualities: grace, mystery, transcendence. To the right audience, Halle Berry is more glamorous commanding the elements as Storm in the X-Men movies than she is walking the red carpet in a designer gown.

– Virginia Postrel

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