Social Nuance Quotes

Honesty is a virtue, but not the only one. If you're in a courtroom you need the whole truth and nothing but the truth; in the living room, sometimes you need anything but. Often.

Anna spoke not only naturally and intelligently, but intelligently and casually, without attaching any value to her own thoughts, yet giving great value to the thoughts of the one she was talking to.

Sometimes you have to learn how to give the right answer to the wrong question.

I feared Sarah was one of those women who instead of laughing said, "That's funny," or instead of smiling said, "That's interesting," or instead of saying, "You are a stupid blithering idiot," said, "Well I think it's a little more complicated than that.

It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken.

She didn't like to be talked about. Equally, she didn't like not to be talked about, when the high-minded chatter rushed on as though she was not there. There was no pleasing her, in fact. She had the grace, even at eleven, to know there was no pleasing her. She thought a lot, analytically, about other people's feelings, and had only just begun to realize that this was not usual, and not reciprocated.

Why e-mail a full emotional statement when, instead, you can text a totally insignificant and ambiguous half-considered phrase?

Taste speaks through a turn of phrase, a curl of the lip, a shrug of the shoulder: it makes an atmosphere.

If there are older black people in the audience that I can see I will not say the n-word. I know they grew up with a different meaning.

A woman can be seeking attention and also make a statement.They don't need to be mutually exclusive.

I believe that sensitivity to issues of race and ethnicity is important, and nuanced, even more so when it intersects with the issue of free speech.

Black people were so angry at me. But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good black people. The world just isn't like that.

Indiscretion has always seemed to me to be one of the privileges of tact.

Unless you recognize the contradictions within various strata, you fall prey to a really kind of false homogenization that does not do justice to the way in which those contradictions can be both understood and is sometimes actually used to the benefit of people who need them.

I believe people are much more complicated than they can handle.

There is nothing in the world so incomprehensible as the joke we do not see.

Many of the people I know and that you know are very complex human beings, and it's not all about race. Everything isn't a question of race. Everything isn't a question of economics at the very base level.

In things that are tender and unpleasing, it is good to break the ice by some one whose words are of less weight, and to reserve the more weighty voice to come in as by chance.

Chicago is not a bad place to live. But the usual story of immigration is the happy fulfillment of human potential in America that is not available anywhere else - it's propaganda, really. It's more complicated than that.

As for 'drawing you out,' please believe I don't do such things deliberately, with an object -- It's only that I am, as a rule, far more interested in people than they are in me -- But it makes me a nuisance, I know: only an innocent nuisance.

Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match.

There is no social question, there are social questions.

Somewhere between a friend and acquaintance—a frequaintance, as it were.