Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
Genteel women suppose that those things do not really exist about which it is impossible to talk in polite company.
Writing is not a genteel profession; it's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty.
Conception is not some genteel, quiet pastime; it’s a fierce and unforgiving team sport.
A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.
All is extremely genteel; and there is almost as much repose as in the golden saloons of the contiguous palaces. At any rate, if there be as much vice, there is as little crime.
Everyone's surprised when they meet me. I guess it's because I've played tough cookies for so long... It's what I do best. I'm not sure I could pull off a genteel Southern belle.
It seemed any young woman at odds with her place in life--be she a genteel lady or a serving girl--might find a happier home within the pages of a book.
A rude nature is worse than a brute nature by so much more as man is better than a beast: and those that are of civil natures and genteel dispositions are as much nearer to celestial creatures as those that are rude and cruel are to devils.
I am a journalist in the field of etiquette. I try to find out what the most genteel people regularly do, what traditions they have discarded, what compromises they have made.
A lot of people say, 'I always knew Lucky Luciano as a very smooth, very elegant, very powerful man.' All the accounts of him as an older man were that he was very genteel but he still had the look of smothered violence behind his eyes.
Mrs. Rouncewell holds this opinion because she considers that a family of such antiquity and importance has a right to a ghost. She regards a ghost as one of the privileges of the upper classes, a genteel distinction to which the common people have n...
He acted like a libertine of Europe with a genteel Southern propriety—and had all the morals of an emotionless psychopath. The two former masked the latter, like leaves covering a snare. You didn't notice the steel jaws until they were impaled in y...
If she did not wish to lead a virtuous life, at least she desired to enjoy a character for virtue, and we know that no lady in the genteel world can possess this desideratum, until she has put on a train and feathers and has been presented to her Sov...
Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which it...
By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who ca...
he saw in Populism the first glimmerings of some of the great intellectual upheavals of the twentieth century—naturalism, muckraking, and hard-hitting social satire—which would eventually topple the genteel tradition of the nineteenth century. In...
Thomas Wollaston, in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, complained that Darwin did no seem to know what a species actually was. The British Quarterly, deliberately sitting up trouble, speculated that a time might come when a monkey could pro...
Composure and self-restraint were not only desirable characteristics in a woman, they were essental. As my mother put it later, it was bad enough having to worry yourself sick every time your husband went up in an airplane; now, she was being told, s...
[first lines] [two figures visible on the horizon prepare to duel. Three witnesses stand between them] Second: Gentlemen, cock your pistols! Gentlemen... Narrator: Barry's father... Second: ...aim your pistols! Narrator: ...had been bred, like many o...
Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and j...
