rules of society Quotes

“In our school there were different groups you would run with, depending on your station in life. There were the town kids, whose daddies owned the hardware store or what have you—they were your cheerleaders and your football players. Then there were hoodlums, the motorcycle types that cut down trees on Halloween. And then there were the rest of us, the poor kids and the farm kids. Greasers, we were called, or Nutters. The main rule was that there was absolutely no mixing.”

“Black folks aren’t born expecting segregation, prepared from day one to follow its confining rules. Nobody presents you with a handbook when you’re teething and says, ‘Here’s how you must behave as a second-class citizen.’ Instead, the humiliating expectations and traditions of segregation creep over you, slowly stealing a teaspoonful of your self-esteem each day.”

“With the passage of time, I became increasingly aware of how all of the adults around me were living with constant fear and apprehension . . . I was feeling more and more vulnerable as I watched them continually struggle to solve the mystery of what white folks expected of them. They behaved as though it were an awful sin to overlook even one of those unspoken rules and step out of ‘their place,’ to cross some invisible line. And yet lots of discussions in my household were about how to cross that line, when to cross that line, and who could cross that line without getting hurt.”

“Our caste was just three away from the bottom. We were artists. And artists and classical musicians were only three steps up from dirt. Literally.”

“So much went through my head. How families are families, no matter the caste. How mothers all have their own worries to bear.”

“‘[…] have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time—beautiful?’ ‘Beautiful?’ said Miss Bartlett, puzzled at the word. ‘Are not beauty and delicacy the same?’ ‘So one would have thought,’ said [Lucy] helplessly. ‘But things are so difficult, I sometimes think.‘”

“I never spoke more plainly in my life. Try believing the evidence instead of insisting that the cameras must be at fault because what they saw was not what you expected.”

“One had followed the rules, and one had not. But the problem with rules... was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time they were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure what side of the line you stood on.”

“And now (he felt sure) Mike was about to be treated as a sovereign by those nabobs—with the world watching. Let ‘em try to roust the boy around after this!”

“If slavery had been abolished I too could have married the man of my choice; I could have had a home shielded by the laws.”

“Our jobs here, as stupid and menial as they may be, allow us to pretend that we are, if even for just a few minutes a day, just like other people”

“They thought he had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings. This was blasphemous doctrine for a slave to teach…”

“A prude thinks that his own rules of propriety are natural laws.”

“You can’t exist in this world with such strong likes and dislikes.”

“Societal conditioning discourages telling the truth to those perceived to be in higher positions.”

“Society programs us, through the subliminal messages of popular culture, to believe that we’re not truly desirable as women unless we adhere to the current standards of physical beauty.”

“The Underlanders hadn’t been rude when they’d wanted him to bathe. They had been trying to keep him alive!”

″ All my life’s been full of hard trouble. If I wasn’t hungry, I was sick. And if I wasn’t sick, I was in trouble. I ain’t never bothered nobody. I just worked hard every day as long as I can remember. ... And now I’m in this. They looking for me and when they catch me they’ll kill me. ”

“The thing to do was to act just like others acted, live like they lived, and while they were not looking, do what you wanted. ”

“But it wasn’t just them. It was the others too. They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, and jelly jelly.”

“As for a divorced daughter – according to Baby Kochamma, she had no position anywhere at all. And as for a divorced daughter from a love marriage, well, words could not describe Baby Kochamma’s outrage. As for a divorced daughter from an intercommunity love marriage – Baby Kochamma chose to remain quiveringly silent on the subject.”

″(Christophine) had a quiet voice and a quiet laugh (when she did laugh), and though she could speak good English if she wanted to, and French as well as patois, she took care to talk as they talked.”

“But, sir, sirs, I see that it’s wrong. It’s wrong because it’s against like society, it’s wrong because every veck on earth has the right to live and be happy without being beaten and tolchocked and knifed. I’ve learned a lot, oh really I have.”

“Women are always to seem to be this and that.”

“An actress,” Tom sneers, “What sort of way is that for a woman to live, without a solid home, husband, children? Running about like she’s her own lord and master. She’ll certainly never be accepted in society as a proper lady.”

“As I afterwards learned, the poor scrivener, when told that he must be conducted to the Tombs, offered not the slightest obstacle, but, in his pale, unmoving way, silently acquiesced.”

″‘Make no mistake about it: What we do here is highly illegal, but that does not mean we don’t follow the rule of law. My law.‘”

″‘They can’t unwind me now—there are laws against unwinding the disabled—but if I got the operation, they’d unwind me the moment I was healed. This way I get to stay whole.’ She smiles at him triumphantly. ‘So you’re not the only one who beat the system.‘”

“You’ll learn, as you get older, that rules are made to be broken. Be bold enough to live life on your terms, and never, ever apologize for it.”

“We are now far away from the country of tortures, dotted with wheels, gibbets, gallows, pillories; we are far, too, from that dream of the reformers, less than fifty years before.”

“Set the force that drove the criminal to the crime against itself.”

“Of course a man may know every one. Men are welcome to the privilege!”