Public Accounts

Famous quotes containing the words public and/or accounts:

“For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

“The mystical nature of American consumption accounts for its joylessness. We spend a great deal of time in stores, but if we don’t seem to take much pleasure in our buying, it’s because we’re engaged in the acts of sacrifice and self-definition. Abashed in the presence of expensive merchandise, we recognize ourselves ... as supplicants admitted to a shrine.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)