Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould Quotes

In civilized communities men's idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behavior. Culture is a mask that hides their faces.

Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners.

Perhaps what you call conventionality, I call decency.

There are the rules and then there are the ways.

Though shyness per se was unacceptable, reserve was a mark of good breeding.

In society it is etiquette for ladies to have the best chairs and get handed things. In the home the reverse is the case. This is why ladies are more sociable than gentlemen.

Insofar as he'd formed any opinion of her, it was that she suffered from misplaced gentility and the mistaken belief that etiquette meant good breeding. She mistook mannerisms for manners.

Society cannot exist without etiquette ... It never has, and until our own century, everybody knew that.

Custom determines what is agreeable.

Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

Yes, etiquette is hypocritical. Yes, it does inhibit children - if you're lucky. But the idea that it's elitist and irrelevant is like saying language is elitist and irrelevant.

Much of a behavior acceptable today would be socially offensive in a saner or more logical arrangement.

Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy; laws are manners fully grown,--or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws.

A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.

I never cheat or steal. Also, I never wear a top-hat with a sack coat or munch bananas in public on the streets, because a gentleman does not do those things either. I would as soon do the one as the other sort of thing--it is all a matter of harmony and good taste.

Nobody thanks a witty man for politeness when he puts himself on a par with a society in which it would not be polite to show one's wit.

I would throw out the sense of nation, "good breeding," certain forms and ceremonies that govern relationships - perhaps even jealousy. We're not aware of all of them yet, though we suffer from them. And they mislead us not only about ethics but also about aesthetics.

The English are busy folk; they have no time in which to be polite.

Young men often laugh at the sensible girls whom they secretly respect, and affect to admire the silly ones whom they secretly despise, because earnestness, intelligence, and womanly dignity are not the fashion.

If your work is so smart that only smart people get it, it's not that smart.

because everybody lies. It's part of living in society .

A gentleman does not appear to know more or to be more than those with whom he is thrown into company.

We're not supposed to mention f***ing in mixed company, but that's exactly where it takes place.

Howard and Shirley were clothed, always, in an invisible layer of decorum that they never laid aside.

Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want.