Quotes About Social norms

You see, no one ever told her to keep her legs closed and crossed at the ankles. No one ever said: "Save it for the one you love" or "Good girls say no.

As a child she had been taught it was rude to say no, unless she didn't mean it. If she was offered another piece of cake and she wanted it she was obliged to refuse out of politeness. And if she didn't want it she had to say yes, even if it choked her. It was involved but understandable.

When you get older, you have to wrestle with what's appropriate behavior a little bit more. Am I not acting too old or too young?

In spite of her giddy airs (the phrase used by the bourgeois wives of Yonville), Emma still had a joyless look, and, habitually, at the corners of her mouth, she had that tightness that crumples the faces of old maids and bankrupts.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

Opinions are like assholes. Everyone's got one. Most people are quite fond of their own, especially in private. Yet they're not really something that should be waved around too much in public. When they are, it's okay to ignore them, because showing them off, unsolicited, is actually kind of rude.

Adam Yates wore freshly ironed khakis and a bright pink shirt that might be the norm on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach but not Broad Street in Newark. He wore loafers without socks, his legs too casually crossed. He had that whole Old World, came-over-on-the-Mayflower thing going on, what with the receding ash-blond hair, the high cheekbones, the eyes so ice blue she wondered if he was wearing contacts. His cologne smelled like freshly cut grass. Loren liked it.

Even when someone introduced the women as someone's daughter or wife, they maintained a distance. With the advent of selfies, people now want to click with all the touching, coming so close.

For most inhabitants of the Arab world, the prevailing cultural attitude toward women - fed and encouraged by Wahhabi doctrine, which is based on Bedouin social norms rather than Islamic jurisprudence - often trumps the rights accorded to women by Islam.

When I go home to Pennsylvania, my cousins who live in small towns and are twenty-three with kids are like 'Krysten, when are you getting married?' 'When are you having a kid?' Honestly, those aren't the most important things to me right now.

My mother's rules had to do with feminine deportment, so I never played hard enough to break a toy or muddy my dress. My father's rules had to do with never shaming the family by even a hint of scandal, and not providing business rivals with an opportunity to kidnap me or throw acid in my face.

And if all womankind banded together and took the male path, the world would turn into one huge brothel.

For me, personally, marriage is a man and a woman living together.

I was always embarrassed because my dad wore a suit and my mother wore flat pumps and a cozy jumper while my friends' parents were punks or hippies.

Italian girls are famous for being snobby and expecting men to make the first move. In America, if I don't make eye contact, the guys won't come over and talk. American girls just go for it. You men are spoiled.

The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

Infatuated people often look ridiculous to others; their nonstop cooing, touching, and kissing can be intolerable to friends who have left that stage behind them.

I love chicken. I would eat chicken fingers on Thanksgiving if it were socially acceptable.

'Brokeback Mountain' takes all your conceptions of America, and the Western, and cowboys, and sexuality, and love, and it stirs them all up.

Clarice concentrated on taking deep breaths. Men did not burst into tears, no matter how terrible the tragedy.

I'm partly somebody else trying to fit in and say the right things and do the right thing and be in the right place and wear what everybody else is wearing. Sometimes I think we're all trying to be shadows of each other, trying to buy the same records and everything even if we don't like them.

The fear of being self-assertive usually surfaces in women who have been trained to be good girls or dutiful daughters.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

Women cannot enjoy a tolerable position in society where it is considered of the utmost importance that they should not infringe a very rigid moral code.