Quotes from Erving Goffman

Morning and lunchtime are times when anyone can appear alone almost anywhere without this giving evidence of how the person is faring in the social world; dinner and other evening activities, however, provide unfavorable information about unaccompanied participants, especially damaging in the case of female participants.

The more there is about the individual that deviates in an undesirable direction from what might have been expected to be true of him, the more he is obliged to volunteer information about himself, even though the cost to him of candor may have increased proportionally.

Whether an honest performer wishes to convey the truth or whether a dishonest performer wishes to convey a falsehood, both must take care to enliven their performances with appropriate expressions, exclude from their performances expressions that might discredit the impression being fostered, and take care lest the audience impute unintended meanings.

As a linguist suggests: " There are messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works (" Hello, do you hear me?"), to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention (" Are you listening?" or in Shakespearean diction, "Lend me your ears!"— and on the other end of the wire "Um-hum!").

the model of "social order." Briefly, a social order may be defined as the consequence of any set of moral norms that regulates the way in which persons pursue objectives.

The world, in truth, is a wedding.

The routines of social intercourse in established settings allow us to deal with anticipated others without special attention or thought.

Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell.

Man is not like other animals in the ways that are really significant: Animals have instincts, we have taxes.

By definition, of course, we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human. On this assumption we exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce his life chances.

I assume that the proper study of interaction is not the individual and his psychology, but rather the syntactical relations among the acts of different persons mutually present to another.