A Quote by Lynn Coady

Sometimes I pine for the era of Miss Manners, when there were hard and fast rules dictating a well-bred individual's behaviour in any given situation.

Lynn Coady

Quote Topics

Any Behaviour Bred Dictating Era Fast Given Hard Individual Manners Miss Miss Manners Pine Rules Situation Sometimes Well Were

Quote Author

Lynn Coady
Canadian - Novelist
Born: January 24, 1970

Miss Manners herself, while never rude, is given to pulling a fast pinch in the way of a handshake on those who believe in kissing on, not even the first date, but the first sighting.

Judith Martin

The usual sniggering examples of animal behaviour were brought in to explain cheating. Funny how the behaviour of shrews and gibbons is never used to explain table manners or road safety or gardening, only sex. Anyway, it was bad Darwinism. Taking the example of a monkey and applying it to yourself misses the point that animal behaviour is made for the benefit of the species, not as an excuse for the individual. Being incapable of sustaining a stable pair and supporting children is really not in the interests of our species. Neither is it really in the best interests of the philanderer.

A. A. Gill

Any grand new dictionary ought itself to be a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.

Simon Winchester

A certain degree of ceremony is a necessary outwork of manners, as well as of religion; it keeps the forward and petulant at a proper distance, and is a very small restraint to the sensible and to the well-bred part of the world.

Lord Chesterfield

There are no hard and fast rules. Sometimes you work for free and get no credit or courtesy. That's why you make sure you do what you love.

Lalah Hathaway

No girl who is well bred, 'kind, and modest, is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want of manners, or of heart.

John Ruskin

No person who is well bred, kind and modest is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want for manners or of heart.

John Ruskin

Lord Darlington (LD): I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules. Lady Windemere (LW): If we had 'hard-and-fast rules' we would find life much simpler. LD: You allow of no exceptions? LW: None! LD: Ah, what a fascinating Puritan you are, LW. LW: The adjective was unnecessary, LD.

Oscar Wilde

The Sixties were an era of extreme reality. I miss the smell of tear gas. I miss the fear of getting beaten.

Hunter S. Thompson

There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.

Henry David Thoreau

Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.

Flannery O'Connor

Let us be very strange and well-bred:Let us be as strange as if we had been married a great while;And as well-bred as if we were not married at all.

William Congreve

You know, I hate to borrow Apple's tag, but think different. Really. From the very beginning. I didn't know what the fast-food rules were. I got my training at the Culinary Institute Of America, and then I opened up a fast food place according to fine dining rules.

Steve Ells

If I'm desperate, I'll read anything. But even when I can be choosy, I still have no hard-and-fast rules. I have rules about what I won't read, rather than what I will. No science fiction, no romance, no chick lit. Although even these rules can be broken.

Sonya Hartnett

The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no thirdclass carriages, and one soul is as good as another.