Tom Robbins Quotes

There's a real intense thing about manners in the South, a real prescribed way to be a woman.

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.

I was always the Southern gentleman.

Well, I'm from the South originally. I grew up in South Carolina definitely learning about manners and being proper and having to go to cotillions.

Oh, all southern women say they're sorry. You could do almost anything, bump into some one, don't spread the jam right, you're always sorry. I've had people tell me to stop saying it so much!

We say grace and we say ma'am. If you ain't in to that, we don't give a damn.

Let's all commit ourselves to the basic civility of minding our own business. Failing that, let's go back to a time when we were nasty and judgmental, but only behind one another's backs.

Etiquette has no regard for moral qualities.

Emily Post says that talking about oneself isn't very polite.' 'I'm sure Miss Post is perfectly correct, but that doesn't seem to stop the rest of us.

Just because I tread heavily on propriety's toes doesn't mean I can't play the game when it's of use to me.

People say when you're in love, you don't need etiquette. Well, you need it then more than anything. Or they say, "At home I can just be myself." What they mean is they can be their worst selves... They always mean they will save all their anxiety about how to behave for somebody like the head waiter of a restaurant, someone they'll never see again.

Most disquieting reflection of all, was it not bad form to think about good form?

Please don't think me negligent or rude. I am both, in effect, of course, but please don't think me either.

All well bred persons lie - Besides, you are a woman; you must never speak what you think.

Lady Bracknell. Good afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving very well. Algernon. I’m feeling very well, Aunt Augusta. Lady Bracknell. That’s not quite the same thing. In fact the two things rarely go together.

I don't want to hear any words like that while I'm here. Scout, you'll get in trouble if you go around saying things like that. You want to grow up to be a lady, don't you?' I said not particularly.

Good manners come, as we say, from good breeding or rather are good breeding; and breeding is acquired by habitual action, in response to habitual stimuli, not by conveying information.

Decorum -- that bug-bear which deters so many from bliss until the opportunity for bliss has forever gone by.

it was always insolent for a common man to take a chair in the presence of a lady - the word LADY, we may be sure, capitalized in her mind, and denoting not sex but rank.

Please, Lord Maccon, use one of the cups. My delicate sensibilities.” The earl actually snorted. “My dear Miss Tarabotti, if you possessed any such things, you certainly have never shown them to me.

But in my book, it was basically bad taste to stare at someone's assets, no matter how much on display they were.

I find it awfully difficult to determine if the habit of talking about oneself at length runs contrary to the basic rules of propriety, or if instead the man exempt from this vice is rare.

It is nasty when you're playing in someone else's house to point out that they don't have enough balls.

She was so Southern that she cried tears that came straight from the Mississippi, and she always smelled faintly of cottonwood and peaches.

I find it very eerie when somebody is being really polite.