Quotes About Poise

There is nothing better than an attractive woman who doesn't act attractive.

There is nothing more beautiful than a confident woman.

Elegance is not the prerogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence, but of those who have already taken possession of their future.

Sprezzatura is a style of elegant nonchalance.

To retain self-control, mental poise, equanimity, under all provocations, great or small, is an indication of a fine strong character. It is a triumph of strength over weakness, of greatness over littleness. The habit of conquering ourselves is the habit of victory; it strengthens all the faculties.

I prefer to be upright and contained -- an urn in daylight.

You look like you'd swallowed a ramrod and it isn't becoming-Rhett Butler

The queen was settling on the edge of the bed, ungainly with hesitation and at the same time exquisite in her grace, like a heron landing in a treetop.

One moves more slowly in heels. Walking fast is neither sexy nor engaging. Nobody notices the people who race around. If you're walking in heels, you've got time. It's much more attractive.

She was the epitome of stately sorrow each time she smiled.

Prettiness fades after a few years, but elegance only increases with age.

But there was something strange about her that made me think she was somebody. I don't mean her poise, the cool manner in which she stood with arms folded just watching all the goings on at the book party. Kids inherit that poise. It's their enemy, the way ignorance was the enemy of my generation.

She was a vision, there was no doubt of it, her face warm and pretty for all its years. It wasn't gaunt so much as naturally angular, and her thinning lips were nearly brightened with rose lipstick, and her eyes, in spite of the fine wrinkles around them, were still vividly blue. The diamonds and pearls on her breast were stunning, and she wore several rich diamond rings on her long hands.

There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. There were no cells moving, and yet there were cells. I could see the shape of the land, how it lay holding silence. Its poise and its stillness were unendurable, like the ring of the silence you hear in your skull when you're little and notice you're living the ring which resumes later in life when you're sick.

Equanimity can be hard to talk about.

la plus belle des savants, la plus savante des belles

She tossed her hair behind her shoulder. Not a coquette's gesture, but a queen's.

Startle not. Startle not, my beauty.

Somehow she managed to enter the corridor, third in line, but dripping all the dignity she could master, and perversely glad she'd smoothed her hair.

Two years of finishing school not entirely wasted. I can manage an imperious exit.

He had thought of her poise as being that of a woman of experience, and been a little afraid of it, he saw it now as the self-confidence of a girl whose adolescent pride had never been shattered. And now it had been shattered, by humble old Harriet of all people, and they could start again together....

And the beauty of a woman, with passing years only grows!

Try to find balance in everything.

I'd love to dance with grace and style, to move as easily as I write.