Quotes About Convention

MARY: Catherine! Is it necessary to include such a detail? CATHERINE: Do you expect our readers to believe that we had no bodily needs or functions for entire days at a time? MARY: No, but such things are simply—unstated. They go without saying. CATHERINE: It's very fashionable now to include realistic details, no matter how unpleasant or improper. Look at the French writers. Look at Émile Zola. MARY: We are not French.

This isn't a dig on journalists, but people like to write about the 'death of blank.' The death of something.

I think the country is very settled in a lot of ways, and we saw that after the Democratic Convention. I think a lot of the bump that we enjoyed came when John Kerry selected John Edwards as his running mate.

The way caricaturists utilized the convention of romantic Salon painting as the basis of a number of images suggests they regarded the Salon as a bastion for official taste and propaganda image-making that often favored the inclinations of the royal family. Caricaturists began to make serious intrusions into the sanctity of Salon exhibitions through their print satires.

Alabaster eyed Emily's still growing stomach. "How many months are you along now?" "Perhaps eleven. I'm not sure. Soon, I shall be able to roll from Upper Foglands to town." "I feel you have lived here longer than eleven months, and you were with child when you arrived. Is it possible your unborn child is waiting for you to be married?" "No, I could never have a child so conventional," Emily said.

Language builds on our cognitive capacities to reason about the goals and intentions of other people, on our desire to imitate, our desire to communicate, and our twin capacities for using convention to name things and sequence to indicate differences between differing possibilities.

the whole trouble with [Julian] Hawthorne is his -conventional- mind. He cannot understand things that are not, but which might be, or ought to be. [Jack London, in a letter from 1905]

a rigid adherence to traditional methods is a huge hindrance to innovative problem solving.

which had existed for 150 years, that married couples were not permitted

The man assumes the role of the loner, the thinker and the searching spirit who calls the privileged and the powerful to task. The power of one was the courage to remain separate, th think through the truth and not be beguiled by convention or the plausible arguments of those who expect to maintain power, whatever the cost.

Gliding across an imaginary line that splits the Pacific Ocean from the north to the south polar caps, the sunrise acquired a new label, June 23. Behind that line, June 22 had just dawned. This murky international convention, amid world chaos, still stood. For the globe still turned as always in the light of the sun, ninety million miles away in black space, and the tiny dwellers on the globe still had to agree, as they went about their mutual butcheries, on a way to tell the time.

Women struggled to enter the all-male professional schools. Dr. Harriot Hunt, a woman physician who began to practice in 1835, was twice refused admission to Harvard Medical School. But she carried on her practice, mostly among women and children. She believed strongly in diet, exercise, hygiene, and mental health. She organized a Ladies Physiological Society in 1843 where she gave monthly talks. She remained single, defying convention here too.

No other speaker at that convention was allowed to ignore the time limit laid out for him in the split-second script, but Goldwater was encouraged to rave and snarl at the cameras until he ran out of things to say. His speech set the tone for the whole convention, and his only real competition was Ronald Reagan. Compared to those two, both Agnew and Nixon sounded like bleeding-heart liberals.

The conventional parabola--sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness--was to him shameful and hypocritical.

In diplomacy, like in great many other things, the rules of engagement survive only until one remarkable person decides to break them.

I think young writers ought to be heretical.

When I was getting ready for the release of 'Deadline,' when it was coming out soon, I decided that the appropriate way to get people excited about the book would be to write a novella in 30 pieces and publish a piece on my blog every day for a month... during a convention, a week-and-a-half-long trip to New York, and a doll traders' expo.

In 'A Room With a View,' you have three young Englishmen running around naked and laughing and whooping and jumping in the water. It's something the English don't apparently find troublesome.

There's a convention that books are mirrors of the real world, but our fact-obsessed age also wants fiction to be factually based and trustworthy.

I've done really well so far in my career by trusting the audience to be as dissatisfied with convention as I am, as a film-goer. You want to go see a film that surprises you in some way.

All young people want to kick up their heels and defy convention; most of them would prefer to do it at a not too heavy cost.

T]he real meaning of 'tradition' was ... 'stupidity on purpose.

Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.

If we say the Geneva Convention is obsolete, then what do others who have our soldiers say?