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Quote by Alison Lurie

“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.”

Quote by Alison Lurie

Book:Foreign Affairs
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Foreign Affairs

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Author

Alison Lurie
Alison Lurie

American novelist born on September 3, 1926. Alison Lurie is known for her delicate psychological portrayals and profound insights into American social culture. more

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“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”

Page 13
Book:Foreign Affairs
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“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.”

Page 13
Book:Foreign Affairs
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“... but as the traveller who has been once from home is wiser than he who has never left his own door step, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinise more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own. And, because of the particular problem which we set out to answer, this tale of another way of life is mainly concerned with education, with the process by which baby, arrived cultureless upon the human scene, becomes a full-fledged adult member of his or her society. The strongest light will fall upon the ways in which Samoan education, in its broadest sense, be able to turn, made newly and vividly self-conscious and self-critical, to judge anew and perhaps fashion differently the education we give our children.”

IntroductionPage 13
Book:Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation
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