Gail Carson Levine Quotes

When it came to, like, appropriate behavior towards one another, it was - I was well-versed.

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

Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

There's a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you've made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I don't suppose I can stop you, but I really don't think it's very considerate.

I lived in a world where social arrangements were taken for granted and assumed to be timeless. A child's obligation was to learn these usages, not to question them. The complexities of racial deportment were of a piece with learning manners and etiquette more generally.

If you behave normally, people treat you normally. It's only when you act as if you're someone special that they feel obliged to stand on ceremony.

You can be assured that I need no one's guidance in anything concerning propriety.

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

Custom has made dancing sometimes necessary for a young man; therefore mind it while you learn it, that you may learn to do it well, and not be ridiculous, though in a ridiculous act.

It's very important to understand how to act in any situation.

Perhaps the summary of good-breeding may be reduced to this rule. "Behave unto all men as you would they should behave unto you." This will most certainly oblige us to treat all mankind with the utmost civility and respect, there being nothing that we desire more than to be treated so by them.

When I'm asked what my girls will think when they grow up, I'll tell them that they have to keep their clothes on till they're 40. But when they're 40, they can make their own decisions.

Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.

I was raised right — I talk about people behind their backs. It's called manners.

Society wants to put us in a box and say, OK, you do this and you do that and you do this, and I'm like, no, I like this, I like that.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage.

The etiquette question that troubles so many fastidious people New Year's Day is: How am I ever going to face those people again?

A lot of our lives are about being polite.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things.

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.

Decency, not to dare to do that in public which it is decent enough to do in private.

Insofar as he'd formed any opinion of her, it was that she suffered from misplaced gentility and the mistaken belief that etiquette meant good breeding. She mistook mannerisms for manners.

People who stare deserve the looks they get.

Dancing is, in itself, a very trifling and silly thing: but it is one of those established follies to which people of sense are sometimes obliged to conform; and then they should be able to do it well. And though I would not have you a dancer, yet, when you do dance, I would have you dance well, as I would have you do everything you do well.

A gentleman does not appear to know more or to be more than those with whom he is thrown into company.