Meg Cabot Quotes

People say that you always have to tell the truth. But they do not mean this because you are not allowed to tell old people that they are old and you are not allowed to tell people if they smell funny or if a grown-up has made a fart. And you are not allowed to say, 'I don't like you,' unless that person has been horrible to you.

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.

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.

You've gotta be very careful that grace and politeness do not merge into a banality of behavior, where we're just nice, sort of 'death by cupcake.'

Etiquette means behaving yourself a little better than is absolutely essential.

The etiquette question has become of so much importance as to be an object of state.

Doubleday is used to my talking about manners because I am, after all, known for that, and that's my persona.

You must pardon me, gentlemen, for being a most unconscionable time a-dying.

I read all the books I could find about manners, and the extraordinary thing was, in all books up to the end of the Second World War, most were directed at how to comport yourself in the presence of the ladies.

All children in the '50s were taught manners, they were taught to say please and thank you, they were taught not to be rude. And I'm seeing some problems today where somebody's losing a job because they made fun of a fat lady that couldn't fit in the elevator. I mean that was the sort of thing that, when I was eight years old, my mother made it very clear to me that that was not okay to say that kind of stuff.

Lack of manners is the sign of a hero.

Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.

Good behavior is everybody's business, and good taste can be everyone's goal.

Normally it is not polite to go into somebody’s room without knocking, but you can make an exception if the person is dead, or pretending to be dead.

There are always proper responses, even to rude questions.

Etiquette has no regard for moral qualities.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things.

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

His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death.

I don't mean to be rude—" he began, in a tone that threatened rudeness in every syllable. "Yet, sadly, accidental rudeness occurs alarmingly often," Dumbledore finished the sentence gravely.

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.

Good manners require space and time.

I am in favor of preserving the French habit of kissing the hands of ladies. After all one must start somewhere.

Wisdom and virtue are by no means sufficient, without the supplemental laws of good-breeding, to secure freedom from degenerating into rudeness, or self esteem from swelling into insolence. A thousand incivilities may be committed, and a thousand offices neglected. without any remorse of conscience, or reproach from reason.

When people complain of the decay of manners they have in mind not the impudent abbreviations of the crowd, but the decline in bowing and scraping and in speaking of one's employer as "the master." What the rich mean by the good manners of the poor is usually not civility, but servility.