Dodie Smith Quotes

When I go home to Pennsylvania, my cousins who live in small towns and are twenty-three with kids are like 'Krysten, when are you getting married?' 'When are you having a kid?' Honestly, those aren't the most important things to me right now.

Brought up to respect the conventions, love had to end in marriage. I'm afraid it did.

When I went to college, as much as my parents emphasized academic achievement, they emphasized marriage even more. They told me that the most eligible women marry young to get a 'good man' before they are all taken.

if you get married they think you're finished and if you are without a woman they think you're incomplete.

In the culture we live in, there's this pervasive, shared agreement that there's a certain body type to admire, and it isn't actually based on anything real or substantive.

It was fashionable, youre supposed to be a married lady, so I did.

We could say politically correct that look doesn't matter, but the look obviously matters.

No woman dresses below herself from mere caprice.

I think there is still pressure to marry. I think there is still pressure to have children. If you're middle or upper class, those pressures exist at a later age now.

She had been bored all afternoon by Percy Gryce... but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptibilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life.

I feel today's society is so judgmental.

I think a single woman's biggest problem is coping with the people who are trying to marry her off!

Oh, Herbert," she said pleadingly to her silent husband, "you must make him marry her! Call for the parson immediately! Look at them... they are...," she sputtered, "canoodling!

So, "normal" is really what society dictates as normal and if we're born in that world, we would see that as normal. But if you think about it for a second, is it really?

How powerful social mores are! Only a spider's web lies across the volcano, yet it refrains from erupting.

In real life people fart, in the movies, people don't. Why not? Farts are a repressed minority. The mouth gets to say all kinds of things, but the other place is supposed to keep quiet. But maybe our lower colons have something interesting to say. Maybe we should listen to them. Farts are human, more human than a lot of people I know. I think we should bring them out of the water closet and into the parlor.

Love is just an institution.

Conformity is an imitation of grace.

The common-sense notion that 'there is a time and a place for everything' gets carried into a set of prescriptions which replicate the social order by assigning social meanings to spaces and times.

If two people want to get married, get married! The Victorians had a great saying: As long as it doesn't scare the horses, do what you want. And I absolutely believe that.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

... it is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code.

Perhaps what you call conventionality, I call decency.

A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.

The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.