Quotes About Social norms

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

Edmund only took Fanny because Mary shocked him, and that Fanny might very likely have taken Crawford if he had been a little more assiduous; yet the matchless rehearsal-scenes and the characters of Mrs. Norris and others have secured, I believe, a considerable party for it. Sense and Sensibility has perhaps the

No puedo hacerme a esas conversaciones y fingir que me intereso por sus cosas como se acostumbra.

Miss Bennet he acknowledged to be pretty, but she smiled too much.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

But wrong, over and over again, wearing one ill-fitting uniform after another of the world's conventions. The only dress that ever suited her was her academic gown, but it was hardly appropriate for the daily occasions of her living.

Here's the thing: the unit of reverence in Europe is the family, which is why a child born today of unmarried parents in Sweden has a better chance of growing up in a house with both of his parents than a child born to a married couple in America. Here we revere the couple, there they revere the family.

We live with a distinct double standard about male and female aggression. Women's aggression isn't considered real. It isn't dangerous; it's only cute. Or it's always self-defense or otherwise inspired by a man. In the rare case where a woman is seen as genuinely responsible, she is branded a monster - an 'unnatural' woman.

The unsaid rule for living in a trailer park is: 'If the door's shut, don't come a-knockin.' But if it's open and you're walkin' by, feel free to say, 'Hello.'

I just feel like in society and in public, we have this unspoken expectation that we're all trying to meet. And there's so much pressure to try to fit in.

As an American married to an Englishman and living in France, I've spent much of my adult life trying to decode the rules of conversation in three countries. Paradoxically, these rules are almost always unspoken.

I was always good at math and science, and I never realized that that was unusual or somehow undesirable.

My background wasn't an issue for her or for her family. But if someone had said to my parents back in the 1970s that one of their children would have a mixed marriage, I think they'd have thought that was very unusual.

I was brought up in a fairly emotionally repressed kind of society in Northeast England where one didn't express emotions and was expected to keep a stiff upper lip.

Among the upper classes, especially three or four generations ago, men and women had separate bedrooms. That's just the way it was.

Years ago, I worked in a newspaper office, and there were men that would have fits of temper, and it was just accepted that that's who they were, and everyone would laugh about it, but if a woman got upset or angry, something wasn't right: she was 'hysterical' or 'a little unhinged.' It didn't have the same sort of connotation at all.

He realized that the ritualized world he had dismissed as feminine was in fact civilization.

If the culture doesn't work, don't buy it.

In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.

I made a bit of a stink. At the time, it was considered very bad form.

The perception of fat people in America is that they're fat, therefore they're dumb, they're lazy, and they must stink.

We're not very accepting of people who act strangely.

I have sometimes felt pressure to dress a certain way because of everyone else. You know what I mean? Girls in high school and strangers on the street have put way more pressure on me to dress a certain way than my mom or dad.

All over America, you see women in yoga pants and men in sweatpants, even when they are not on their way to or from a yoga class or softball field. When I fly, I see so many sweat suits – even pajamas – on my fellow travelers that it's as though the airplane were the sleeper car of a train bound for summer camp or a gym in the sky, not a public space for business people and vacationers.