Jean Kerr Quotes

We arrange our lives-even the best and boldest men and women that exist, just as much as the most limited-with reference to what society conventionally rules and makes right.

The framework of men's wear is so narrow, that when you play at the edges you get labeled.

The whole system of society tells you what to do.

We're supposed to be civilized. We're supposed to go to work every day. We're supposed to be nice to our friends and send Christmas cards to our parents.

One can be inclined to just say, "F this political correctness! I don't have time for that!"

The rule is not written anywhere, it's not etched in any  -  but, I mean, that's the prevailing attitude of this entire society. Don't have an adventure.

People like you to be something, preferably what they are.

Is anyone human actually normal? I'm beginning to think being normal is actually abnormal.

The virtue in most request is conformity.

In some ways, the documentary form is a kind of trap and so is societal norms.

I like playing the social convention. If you're in a period drama, there's always something dancing underneath the surface as a human - but then you always have to conform to the social conventions around you, and those two things get to be juxtaposed against each other. You're being human, but you're trapped within the social convention of the time.

We live not according to reason, but according to fashion.

I was perfectly certain that I had nothing to offer of an individual nature and that my only chance of doing my duty as the wife of a public official was to do exactly as the majority of women were doing.

Our words had to be circumspect. We could not write anything too negative about our circumstances. This was tricky, since the very form of a married woman's letter needed to include the usual complaints -- that we were pathetic, powerless, worked to the bone, homesick, and sad. We were supposed to speak directly about our feelings without appearing ungrateful, no-account, or unfilial.

Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.

The conventions of society are all in the interests of morality. If you're conventional, you'll be good, in a negative sense, of course.

I don't think I'm abnormal and I think that lets people down.

Men have a trick of coming up to what is expected of them, good or bad.

It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.

One struggles always with these norms. So one doesn't construct oneself freely without respect to norm but one works with one's historical situation and sees where there might be some play. Where there might be some freedom to move.

Each human being is unique, each with their own qualities, instincts, forms of pleasure, and desire for adventure. However, society always imposes on us a collective ways of behaving, and people never stop to wonder why they should behave like that. They just accept it, the way typists accepted the fact that the QWERTY keyboard was the best possible one. Have you ever met anyone is your entire life who asked why the hands of a clock should go in one particular direction and not the other?

All kinds of frankness and honesty are terrible crimes in the eyes of society.

Tradition implies authority, conformity, imitation, following.

I got tired of doing battle with people thinking I was a little weird because I wasn't in a band making happy, stilted music. The only people who really seem weird to me are people who think they're normal. People who think it's possible to be normal just by doing the same things that most people do. Is there a most people? I don't know. Television makes it seem like there is, but I think that might just be television.