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Foreign Affairs

Book by Alison Lurie · 23 quotes · Page 13, Page 34, Page 57

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Foreign Affairs Quotes

“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.”

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign Affairs

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

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign Affairs

“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.”

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign Affairs

“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).”

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign Affairs

“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.”

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign Affairs

“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.”

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign Affairs

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

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Source: Foreign Affairs

“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.”

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign Affairs

“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.”

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign Affairs

“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.”

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign Affairs

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

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign Affairs

“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.”

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign Affairs

“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.”

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign Affairs

“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.”

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign Affairs

“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.”

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign Affairs

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

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign Affairs

“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”

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign Affairs

“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.”

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign Affairs

“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.”

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign Affairs

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

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign Affairs

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

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign Affairs

“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?”

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign 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.”

Book:Foreign Affairs

Source: Foreign Affairs

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