Peter Greenaway Quotes

We don't kiss in public. It's not done.

Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split.

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.

In my day, there were things that were done, and things that were not done, and there was even a way of doing things that were not done.

Custom meets us at the cradle and leaves us only at the tomb.

Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.

New customs, Though they be never so ridiculous (Nay, let em be unmanly), yet are followed.

Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both:---touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-Am's private own: not spirit, soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone's to take in any any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement. But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too.

Respectability is joining chastity in the museum of dead issues.

People are always separable.

Traditions are neither good nor bad, they simply are... Rationality is not an arbiter of traditions, it is itself a tradition or an aspect of a tradition.

We learn the social norms of our society and modify our behaviour accordingly.

Custom is custom: it is built of brass, boiler-iron, granite; facts, reasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar.

I'm not extra sensitive to handshakes. I shake hands all the time.

The line between the public life and the private life has been erased, due to the rapid decline of manners and courtesy. There is a certain crudeness and crassness that has suddenly become accepted behavior, even desirable.

She thought how strange it would be if she ever said 'Hello' to him. One did not greet oneself each morning.

In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.

to a Southerner it is faux pas, not sins, that matter in this world.

Deference often shrinks and withers as much upon the approach of intimacy as the sensitive plant does upon the touch of one's finger.

Wave the flag, wave the Bible, wave your sex or your business degree, whatever you want, just don't wave that thing at me.

Cover that bosom that I must not see: souls are wounded by such things.

... 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.

The morality of customs,the spirit of the laws, produces the man emancipated from the law.

When politeness is used to show up other people, it is reclassified as rudeness. Thus it is technically impossible to be too polite.

It takes far more courage to violate a custom than a law.