Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary Wilson Little

“It is difficult to see why lace should be so expensive; it is mostly holes” lands because it treats a luxury good with the blunt accounting of a hardware-store clerk. Mary Wilson Little punctures the aura of refinement by describing lace in purely negative space: not fabric, but absence. The joke is tidy, visual, and slightly impolite in the best way, the kind of remark that turns a parlor object into something you can’t unsee.

The intent isn’t just to mock a fussy textile. It’s to expose how status pricing works: value clings to what a culture agrees to admire, not to what’s materially there. Lace is labor-intensive and historically signaled leisure (someone else did the work; someone else did the washing). Little sidesteps the romance of “craft” and aims at the social performance surrounding it. When she says “difficult to see,” she’s also hinting at willful blindness: we’re trained to overlook the obvious so we can keep believing in the magic of taste.

The subtext carries a gendered edge. Lace sits in the domestic and feminine sphere, a coded language of respectability, delicacy, and class aspiration. Calling it “mostly holes” reframes that language as an expensive void, suggesting that what women are expected to prize (and purchase) can be as much about display and constraint as beauty. It’s a quiet, sharp skepticism about consumer culture before “consumer culture” was the phrase: a reminder that the market can sell you emptiness if it’s stitched into the right pattern.