Quotes About Social norms

Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family their defense of families carries no conviction.

If you want to look like the people next door, you're probably smothering yourself and your dreams.

Nowadays you have to go pretty far south in Italy before you encounter the widespread belief that any foreign girl is a whore unless her father and two brothers drive her around in an armoured car.

Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

Just think, she said to herself. I could be living on the Right Bank. I could be married to a senior clerk at the Treasury. I could be sitting with my feet up, embroidering a linen handkerchief with a rambling-rose design. Instead I'm on the rue des Cordeliers in pursuit of a baguette, with a three-inch blade for comfort.

He ought to have been taught better than to let his emotions show on his face. Instead, he assumed that others would care about his feelings, so he didn't bother to hide them.

She was twenty-five before it occurred to her that she could have insulted him back, but the rule of life was that the boys got to decide which girls were pretty; it didn't really matter how ugly they were themselves.)

If you're not asking every child in the class, you don't hand out the invitations on the playground," said Madeline. "Every mother knows that. It's a law of the land." "I could talk about this subject all day long," said Ed. "I really could. There is nothing else I want to talk about today other than Amabella's fifth-birthday party.

I squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that's hard to unravel.

you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them.

I think about how you get trained early on as woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two in a terrible tangle that's hard to unravel.

If men can run the world, why can't they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?

Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat

More than we realize, girls understand us to be saying that they must always be utterly and completely forthright. That's a problem, especially when we combine it with the cultural injunction to be agreeable. A girl can't actually accomplish both because, like any other human, every girl contains a world of complicated thoughts and feelings. She cannot possibly be simultaneously see-through and utterly pleasing to others.

I had gone back to being the "other" Saffyre Maddox, the one who showed up in the classroom every morning clean and fresh, hair neatly tied back, some mascara, some lip gloss. It wasn't so much that I actively wanted to look nice, it was more that if I didn't look nice, people would worry, they'd ask me questions, the pastoral-care woman would pull me into her office and expect me to tell her what was wrong with me.

The purpose of society is to prevent natural behavior.

Many girls aspire to a version of selfhood that puts a psychological glass ceiling on their potential to succeed. They suffer from what I call the Curse of the Good Girl: the pressure to be liked by everyone, generous to a fault, and flawless at everything you do.

We knew the pain of winter rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other...

Boys don't know how to be uncomfortable in their bodies, I realized, even the ones who don't look great. It's not that they can't be shy, or sad, or scared, just like girls. It's that they haven't been taught their bodies are bad their whole lives, like we are.

What is perceived as normal. That makes it other people's failings. Deficits. Not yours. Who the hell sets the standards, huh? Who gets to say how we are supposed to be? Or who we are supposed to be? And how dare anyone make you feel inadequate for being who you are? It's not okay. It pisses me off.

But I do not fit well into any social mold whatsoever. That is not appealing to others.

As far as I can tell, dumping soda on people is the equivalent of 'Hi, it's nice to meet you' in this part of the world. Frankly, I think standard greetings work better, but what do I know?

I'd like to play with a period piece. Playing a girl next door in 2010 is so different from playing one in 1950, the way you talk, walk, dress, relationships. It's really fun studying all that.

Laws are subordinate to custom.