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"Even the simplest things had a glorious pointlessness to them. When buttons came in, about 1650, people couldn't get enough of them and arrayed them in decorative profusion on the backs and collars and sleeves of coats, where they didn't actually do anything. One relic of this is the short row of pointless buttons that are still placed on the underside of jacket sleeves near the cuff. These have been purely decorative and have never had a purpose, yet 350 years later on we continue to attach them as if they are the most earnest necessity."
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"Dresses won't worn out in the wardrobe, but that is not what dresses are designed for."
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Personal Development
"The fashion of the world is to avoid cost, and you encounter it."
Author Name
Personal Development
"He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave."
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Personal Development
"With right fashion, every female would be a flame."
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Personal Development
"Which outfits do you get the most compliments on when you are wearing them? What colors make you feel healthy, vibrant, and alive?"
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Personal Development
"Jewelry maybe is more expensive than clothes, but clothes are more important than jewelry."
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Personal Development
"Law is vulnerable to the winds of intellectual or moral fashion, which it then validates as the commands of our most basic concept."
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Personal Development
"Your dresses should be tight enough to show you're a woman and loose enough to show you're a lady."
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Personal Development
"Once you establish a look, and once everybody recognizes that look as your look, you never have to think about fashion again."
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Personal Development
"I just put on what the lady says. I've been married three times, so I've had lots of supervision."
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Personal Development
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"In the mystifying world that was Victorian parenthood, obedience took precedence over all considerations of affection and happiness, and that odd, painful conviction remained the case in most well-heeled homes up until at least the time of the First World War."
Parenting
"In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless."
Adaptation
"Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed."
Light
"Shakespeare 'never owned a book,' a writer for the New York Times gravely informed readers in one doubting article in 2002. The statement cannot actually be refuted, for we know nothing about his incidental possessions. But the writer might just as well have suggested that Shakespeare never owned a pair of shoes or pants. For all the evidence tells us, he spent his life naked from the waist down, as well as bookless, but it is probably that what is lacking is the evidence, not the apparel or the books."
Literature
"Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener."
Architecture
"She was torn between her customer service training and her youthful certitude."
Conflict
"When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn't wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on."
Life
"I don't plan to write another science book, but I don't plan not to. I do enjoy writing histories, and taking subjects that are generally dull and trying to make them interesting."
Science
"In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face."
Science
"If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it."
Humor
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