I am said to be difficult of acquaintance, unwilling to meet any one half way, and showing a social manner which is easy, not diffident, but formal and unresponsive, tending constantly to hold people off.
In Sweden everybody has this perfect surface. Everyone's very polite and controls their feelings.
My friends and I had fun together, but I was more reserved, not at all the life of the party. I would just be the quiet one in the room.
In Kansas, people are reserved, quiet, taciturn.
I think what's wrong with too many people is they're too reserved. They're miserable, but they don't want to talk about it.
As far as I have been able to understand, the Japanese seem to keep things close to the vest. Friendly but remote and polite to the point of being invisible. It is in the music, literature, film and art that the Japanese really seem to express themselves.
Being English, we're polite and reserved, we don't express our opinions; we're very private people.
Seattle is not an overly friendly city. It is a civil city, but not altogether friendly. People from outside mistake the civility for friendliness. Seattle is full of people who have their own lives to live. They won't waste their time being friendly. But they are civil.
My father and he had cemented one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.
I've always been relatively reserved with my social encounters.
Reserve is an artificial quality that is developed in most of us but as the result of innumerable rebuffs.
I've always been quiet, for the most part, especially any time I've come into a new environment.
Having our privacy exposed is particularly crushing for the British - a nation for whom the phrase: 'How are you?' really means: 'Please say one word, then leave me alone.'
I guess it's the Russian side of me that takes me a long time to get close to people.
Okay, maybe I don't go around loving everybody I meet, maybe my smiles are hard to come by, but I do care for some people.
My friends who are not from Sweden tell me that I'm more reserved or maybe more ... I guess the opposite of what a Latin American would be. Maybe because Scandinavians are more careful with their words and I guess it takes a lot to become a friend of a Swede.
I said nothing—I hadn’t known Marya, and anyway, “listening quietly” was my general social strategy
There is much coldness among men because we do not dare to be as cordial as we really are.
A man's profundity may keep him from opening on a first interview, and his caution on a second; but I should suspect his emptiness, if he carried on his reserve to a third.
