Virginia Postrel quote: "The low point for neon came in 1982, when Holiday Inn did away with its signature 'Great Sign,' replacing the neon extravaganza with a forgettable green plastic box."

Cable companies aren't bad because they're parts of unwieldy media conglomerates. They'r...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Our demand for good looks, expressed in the biting comments that ensue when public figures fall shor...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Scientists appear most often in horror movies. Through childlike curiosity or God-defying hubris, th...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Glamour invites us to live in a different world. It has to simultaneously be mysterious, a little bi...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

The mere existence of 'Buffy' proves the declinists wrong about one thing: Hollywood commerc...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

As a general rule, durable-goods production tends to be the most volatile sector of the economy. Sin...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control - to make the wor...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Kidney disease is a low-profile, unglamorous problem, a disease that disproportionately strikes mino...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

When Baby Boomer women started choosing hotel-like birthing centers over hospital delivery rooms, ho...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

As borrowers, we may feel guilty about running up debt, anxious about making payments, and resentful...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

A world of few choices, whether in jeans or mates, is a world in which individual differences become...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Rich people in poor places want to show off their wealth. And their less affluent counterparts feel ...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Americans born since World War II have grown up in a media-saturated environment. From childhood, we...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

The impulse for personal adornment is hard to stamp out.
VIRGINIA POSTREL

The goal of socialism is a fairer allocation of economic resources, which its advocates often claim ...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Socialism is about claims of justice, and it is also about money: about wealth, income, physical and...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Average Americans order nonfat decaf iced vanilla lattes at Starbucks and choose from 1,500 drawer p...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

When 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' premiered on the WB Network in 1996, American culture was in...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Before it became a ubiquitous part of urban life, Starbucks was, in most American cities, a radicall...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

The glamour of twentieth-century air travel helped to persuade once-fearful travelers to take to the...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

The glamour of air travel - its aspirational meaning in the public imagination - disappeared before ...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

From the days of biplanes and silk scarves, the aviator has been the archetype of masculine glamour....
VIRGINIA POSTREL

The Dallas model, prominent in the South and Southwest, sees a growing population as a sign of urban...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Clothing creates the illusion that bodies fit an aesthetically pleasing norm. And that illusion depe...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Persuasion has become a kind of force. The more the advertiser knows about what consumers want, and ...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

In Shakespeare's world, characters cannot trust their senses. Is the ghost in Hamlet true and tr...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Most of us cluster somewhere in the middle of most statistical distributions. But there are lots of ...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

We are material creatures who spend much of our lives on material pursuits (even building a cathedra...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Society needs both parents and nonparents, both the work party and the home party. While raising chi...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shatte...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

If you default on your Visa bill, nobody comes to repossess your refrigerator or auction off your sh...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Glamour is an imaginative process that creates a specific emotional response: a sharp mixture of pro...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Like the skyscraper, the automobile, and the motion-picture palace, neon signs once symbolized popul...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Cosmetics makers have always sold 'hope in a jar' - creams and potions that promise youth, b...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Chains do more than bargain down prices from suppliers or divide fixed costs across a lot of units. ...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

The SAT is not perfect. We all know smart, knowledgeable people who do badly on standardized tests. ...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

The elements that create glamour are not specific styles - bias-cut gowns or lacquered furniture - b...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Airline glamour never promised anything as mundane as elbow room, much less a flat bed, a massage, o...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

'Frankenstein' did not invent the fear of science; the novel found its audience because it d...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

The Internet exposes a diversity of opinion, experience, and taste we'd been led to believe didn...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Barack Obama has brought glamour back to American politics - not the faux glamour-by-association of ...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

We've gone from a world in which Starbucks set a cutting-edge standard for mass-market design to...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Viewers don't care how big media companies are. They care whether they can dump those they don&#...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Kidney donors don't have to be close relatives of recipients, but they do need to have the right...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

'The Matrix' is a movie that is all about glamour. I could do a whole talk on 'The Matri...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Living with a single kidney is almost exactly like living with two; the remaining kidney expands to ...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

The evergreen story of people in debt becomes even sexier in an economic downturn, when debts inevit...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Though designed as a mere convenience, clothing sizes establish an unintended norm, an ideal from wh...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

In post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America, skeptical voters demand full disclosure of everything from ...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

With its fluctuating forms and needless decoration, fashion epitomizes the supposedly unproductive w...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

By reshaping or decorating our outer selves, we express our inner sense of self: 'I like that...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Behind the criticism of fashion as an artistic medium is a highly ideological prejudice: against mar...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Abundant choice doesn't force us to look for the absolute best of everything. It allows us to fi...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

'CSI' has not only remained a top-rated show through seven seasons; it has had real-world co...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Standardized sizes made inexpensive, off-the-rack garments economically feasible. They gave shoppers...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Although people often equate them, glamour is not the same as beauty, stylishness, luxury, celebrity...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Grassroots techies - the mostly unknown people who write code and start companies that don't mak...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Like the 'test tube babies' born of in vitro fertilization, cloned children need not be iden...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

On the Net, the bell curve reclaims its tails. The uncommon is as accessible as the common. The very...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Like John Kennedy in 1960, Obama combines youth, vigor, and good looks with the promise of political...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Glamour is a beautiful illusion - the word 'glamour' originally meant a literal magic spell ...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Religion, art, and science flourish best in a free society. True, freedom does not afford much oppor...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

The Internet ethos of diversity and competition runs exactly counter to uniform, gatekeeper-oriented...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

The children who are 'our future' will inherit a world created not just by parental devotion...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Neon signs don't consume much power, but they look like they do. A cousin of fluorescent lightin...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

The growth of medical expenditures in the U.S. is not caused by administrative costs but by increase...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

When I was in college, I wanted to be editor of 'Reason' when I grew up. It was an impractic...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

A standard 'well woman' checkup can last as little as 10 minutes, hardly time for any in-dep...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Apple doesn't need to maximize book sales. It simply needs to keep publishers happy enough to ma...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Internet pharmacies return to consumers the choice promised by supporters of the 1938 Food, Drug and...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

What makes a loft authentic isn't its layout or its history but its ability to give people a tru...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Clothes are unique sculptures, dependent on a supporting human form and created to move.
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Loft living is the antithesis of suburban domesticity, if only because the open spaces don't eas...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

More than two decades after the birth of Louise Brown, and all the hysteria that surrounded her '...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Like the rest of the genetic lottery, beauty is unfair. Everyone falls short of perfection, but some...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

The Elgin Marbles were supposed to be on the Parthenon. For many works of art, a museum is an artifi...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

By binding image and desire, glamour gives us pleasure, even as it heightens our yearning. It leads ...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Through the 1990s, 'Reason' was a voice of 'dissident feminism,' upholding the equal...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

America is a mosaic not of groups but of individuals, each of whom carries a host of cultural influe...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Cinema isn't just a good medium for translating graphic novels. It's specifically a good med...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

The Taliban outlawed wearing polish in the late 1990s, punishing some offenders by amputating a fing...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

The definition of an 'operating system' is bound to evolve with customer demands and technol...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

As discomfiting as it is to both market optimists and policy activists, a certain amount of instabil...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

There's a popular saying that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it....
VIRGINIA POSTREL

The intimate contest for self-command never ends, and lifetime happiness requires finding the right ...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

For designers, the rigidity of an alphabet presents a never-ending artistic challenge: How do you do...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

We know beauty when we see it, and our reactions are remarkably consistent. Beauty is not just a soc...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

In the fall of 1978, I left the religious, conservative, biracial, slow-paced culture of South Carol...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

The profusion of fonts is one more product of the digital revolution. Beginning in the mid-'80s ...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

In a media culture, we not only judge strangers by how they look but by the images of how they look....
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Traditional PCs face competition from specialty products like Palm Pilots and from the servers that ...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Rising living standards - whether in a village, a region, a nation, or the world - depend first on s...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Fit experts envision a future in which you'd carry your body scan in your cell phone or on a thu...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Y2K hype taps our native discomfort with the realities of a dynamic, evolving social order. It eleva...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Glamour is all about transcending this world and getting to an idealized, perfect place. And this is...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

A lot of consumers actively enjoy advertising, especially fashion print ads and clever TV commercial...
VIRGINIA POSTREL

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in c...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

To have a successful writing career, you must be willing to sacrifice a great deal. The book, the de...
VIRGINIA HENLEY

We have a responsibility to help those around us and help others in need.
VIRGINIA WILLIAMS

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as w...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends c...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It exp...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and t...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is writ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

So much is asked of parents, and so little is given.
VIRGINIA SATIR

We must not allow other people's limited perceptions to define us.
VIRGINIA SATIR

Life is not what it's supposed to be. It's what it is. The way you cope with it is what make...
VIRGINIA SATIR

Problems are not the problem; coping is the problem.
VIRGINIA SATIR

There is an abundance of misinformation, exaggeration, and blatant lies being spread by interest gro...
VIRGINIA FOXX

It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by l...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

For love... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It h...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of ro...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

I believe the greatest gift I can conceive of having from anyone is to be seen by them, heard by the...
VIRGINIA SATIR

Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
VIRGINIA WOOLF

It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entir...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever t...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect t...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

I hope Britney doesn't get bummed out that Lindsey is a better singer. It is not Lindsey saying ...
VIRGINIA MADSEN

If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not abo...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by fi...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

I feel certain that I'm going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times....
VIRGINIA WOOLF

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

I always felt that I hadn't achieved what I wanted to achieve. I always felt I could get better. Tha...
VIRGINIA WADE

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery --always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure -- the relationship so secret and private compa...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
VIRGINIA WOOLF

All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority an...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to t...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in,...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handlin...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distort...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the poli...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of an...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Our brave soldiers and support personnel are engaged in a battle as important as any the United Stat...
VIRGINIA FOXX

Fly high... Where the only chill that cuts through you is the wind. Where your heart pounds from exh...
VIRGINIA ALISON

When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even t...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to fol...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about e...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in t...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than whe...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doin...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It exp...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Books are the mirrors of the soul.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, re...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her c...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as s...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority th...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intell...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and w...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before...
VIRGINIA WOOLF

The low point for neon came in 1982, when Holiday Inn did away with its signature 'Great Sign,' replacing the neon extravaganza with a forgettable green plastic box.

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Virginia Postrel

The low point for neon came in 1982, when Holiday Inn did away with its signature 'Great Sign,' replacing the neon extravaganza with a forgettable green plastic box.

Virginia Postrel

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