Virginia Postrel Quotes

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

If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.

The One, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, these are what we call the transcendental attributes of Being, because they surpass all the limits of essences and are coextensive with Being.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

The red carpet is kind of a surreal experience. There's nothing normal about it, so for me the most important thing is to maintain some normality right until the point you get out of the car.

By binding image and desire, glamour gives us pleasure, even as it heightens our yearning. It leads us to feel that the life we dream of exists, and to desire it even more.

Being on a movie set is wonderful experience, but it's a bubble - it isn't real life.

In L.A., I don't really want to go out because traffic sucks so bad. I'm sorry, I'm not going to spend five hours a day in my car, so you have to choose where you live very carefully.

I was quiet, a loner. I was one of those children where, if you put me in a room and gave me some crayons and a pencils, you wouldn't hear from me for nine straight hours. And I was always drawing racing cars and rockets and spaceships and planes, things that were very fast that would take me away.

Over my lifetime, the car had actually transcended the fact that it is a car. It has become a venue.

Now, everyone in movies is always rich, and they're always beautiful and graceful-looking.

I don't think people should confuse fantasy and reality because no one is perfect - we all know that.

What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.

Models are there to look like mannequins, not like real people. Art and illusion are supposed to be fantasy.

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

It's the same thing that drives people to want to experience sexual pleasure or have one too many drinks. We all want to experience the other, and to get out of our daily existence.

The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.

Life's too short when you find yourself sitting in a car for four hours every day trying to get from East L.A. to West L.A. to Hollywood and then back to East L.A.

The automobile, both a cause and an effect of this decentralization, is ideally suited for our vast landscape and our generally confused and contrary commuting patterns.

We have no right to pick out all that is noblest and fairest in man, to project these qualities into space, and to call them God. We only thus create an ideal figure, a purified, ennobled, 'magnified' Man.

I have an imagination because my life is so boring that my imagination lets me get off the reality of what's going on.

I envision a future without traffic accidents or congestion. A future where everyone can use a car.

In a sense, fictional dystopias have been a way of distracting us from the truth of our condition by placing it 'over there.'

In your imagination, you can perfect things in a way you can't do in your everyday life.

It's like reading a book about a life that you will never occupy, but that's the beauty of being transported.