Jodi Picoult Quotes

If someone's being less than courteous to you, I don't think you need to pay any attention to them.

I have never really encountered anybody that was rude to me. Well, not to my face anyway.

Closing one's eyes is not a recipe for peace. It is a simple way to embolden aggressive personalities.

Life is a matter of dealing with other people, in little matters and cataclysmic ones, and that means a series of conversations.

I don't know how to talk. Oh! talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.

Says the rude child: "No, I won't do it." Says the courteous grown-up: "Yes, I won't do it.

That politeness which we put on, in order to keep the assuming and the presumptuous at a proper distance will generally succeed. But it sometimes happens that these obtrusive characters are on such excellent terms with themselves that they put down this very politeness to the score of their own great merits and high pretensions, meeting the coldness of our reserve with a ridiculous condescension of familiarity, in order to set us at ease with ourselves.

Yet, sadly, accidental rudeness occurs alarmingly often. Best to say nothing at all, my dear man.

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

I have often been asked, Do not people bore you? I do not understand quite what that means. I suppose the calls of the stupid and curious, especially of newspaper reporters, are always inopportune. I also dislike people who try to talk down to my understanding. They are like people who when walking with you try to shorten their steps to suit yours; the hypocrisy in both cases is equally exasperating.

I don't think that there is a person that I've met - I'm sure there are - that I've had any conflict with.

I've had to relearn how I work with people so that if and when I do avoid different things I don't send any messages in doing so.

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.

Typically, I would run away from conflict and write about it - that was easier than staying and dealing face-to-face with humans; that's terrifying for me.

No one is more insufferable than he who lacks basic courtesy.

I have often seen people uncivil by too much civility, and tiresome in their courtesy.

My father was not comfortable working with very articulate people. He and Willie Wyler got along because neither of them was very articulate.

In truth, politeness is artificial good humor, it covers the natural want of it, and ends by rendering habitual a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue.

Anytime anybody is rude, it makes me double-check my own behavior to make sure I don't do that to other people.

I'm not good at confrontation. I know my strengths. I like company. And I am not a great arguer... I do find it much easier talking to people I like about things we both like.

I hate people.

I have a respect for manners as such, they are a way of dealing with people you don't agree with or like.

Etiquette is all human social behavior. If you're a hermit on a mountain, you don't have to worry about etiquette; if somebody comes up the mountain, then you've got a problem. It matters because we want to live in reasonably harmonious communities.

I don't walk into a dinner party and say, 'You're an idiot; give me my coat.'

I think you have to be respectful to the people who want to talk to you.