Top 50 Quotes About Genteel
#1. Professors of literature, who for the most part are genteel but mediocre men, can make but a poor defense of their profession, and the professors of science, who are frequently men of great intelligence but of limited interests and education
Yvor Winters
#2. That curiously clean, semi-transparent look of the genteel, isolated poor.
D.H. Lawrence
#3. Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.
Leslie Fiedler
#4. CHAPTER VII WHICH THE GENTEEL READER IS RECOMMENDED TO SKIP, LOW PERSONS BEING HERE INTRODUCED
Charlotte Bronte
#5. Sullivan, just pick it up."
"My way is more genteel."
"Your way is more tight ass."
"Your respect for me, Sentinel, is astounding."
"I'd respect you more if you took a bite of that dog."
"You don't respect me any."
"Like I said, I'd respect you more. More than none.
Chloe Neill
#6. 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.
Margaret Cavendish
#7. Love is not a profession
genteel or otherwise
sex is not dentistry
the slick filling of aches and cavities
you are not my doctor
you are not my cure,
nobody has that
power, you are merely a fellow/traveler.
Margaret Atwood
#8. Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
Thomas Hardy
#9. 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.
Vincent Piazza
#10. In no part of the world is genteel visiting founded on esteem, in the absence of suitable furniture and complete dinner-service.
George Eliot
#11. 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.
Rhea Perlman
#12. Next to clothes being fine, they should be well made, and worn easily; for a man is only the less genteel for a fine coat, if, in wearing it, he shows a regard for it, and is not as easy in it as if it was a plain one.
Lord Chesterfield
#13. They talk o' rich folks bein' stuck up and genteel, but for iron-clad pride o' respectability there's nowt like poor chapel folk. Why, 'tis as cold as the wind on Greenhow Hill
aye, and colder, too, for 'twill never change.
Rudyard Kipling
#14. If you are in any way squeamish or genteel, skip 'Gillespie and I.' If you'd like to know a little more about the seamy side of the human condition, by all means, pick this one up.
Carolyn See
#15. Franchot Tone is nuttier than a fruitcake, so don't let the genteel frosting fool you.
Burgess Meredith
#16. Writing is not a genteel profession; it's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty.
Rosemary Mahoney
#17. Genteel women suppose that those things do not really exist about which it is impossible to talk in polite company.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#18. The genteel thing is the genteel thing any time, if as be that a gentleman bees in a concatenation accordingly.
Oliver Goldsmith
#19. 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.
Isaac D'Israeli
#20. Kingsley looked magnificent, like a Regencyera fever dream. If Jane Austen had set eyes on Kingsley, she would never have written her genteel comedies of manner.
She would have written porn.
Tiffany Reisz
#21. There cannot be a surer proof of low origin, or of an innate meanness of disposition, than to be always talking and thinking of being genteel.
William Hazlitt
#22. Nor was I following how someone who seemed so sweet and genteel at Bible study was acting like someone who'd contracted mad cow disease. Or maybe politics made people act slightly demon-possessed.
Christy Barritt
#23. 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 no claim.
Charles Dickens
#24. But we are more than genteel or civilized/ we are an idea in the process of being realized.
Shane Koyczan
#25. They all agree, Italy is not what it used to be. What is? All my adult life I've heard how Silicon Valley used to be all orchards, how Atlanta used to be genteel, how publishing used to be run by gentlemen, how houses used to cost what a car costs now. All true, but what can you do but live now?
Frances Mayes
#26. There's an obsession, within our culture, with the genteel thief. Somebody who commits a crime, but does it in a classy way.
Geoffrey Gray
#27. It would be tedious to attempt a phonetic reproduction of Mr. Sage's utterances. Enough to say that they were genteel to a fantastic degree. "Aye thot Aye heeard somewon teeking may neem in veen," may give some idea of his rendering of the above sentence. Let it go at that.
Anonymous
#28. Twenty years ago I might have hired a professional listener, but somewhere along the way I had lost faith in the talking cure. A genteel fraud in my view.
Ian McEwan
#29. My sister and I didn't know what that meant either but we were not equal to two questions in a row. And I knew that wasn't what rape meant anyway; it meant something dirty. "Purse. Purse stolen," said my mother in a festive but cautioning tone. Talk in our house was genteel.
Alice Munro
#30. I could've totally cut out your heart before you knew what was happening." "What stopped you?" "I thought Montgomery might've been pissed off at all the blood on the sheets." "Montgomery would never be something as uncouth as pissed off. Annoyed in an icily genteel manner, perhaps.
Nalini Singh
#31. None of this, of course, was ever stated: the genteel social Darwinism of the English middle classes always remained implicit.
Julian Barnes
#32. 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.
Amy Vanderbilt
#33. It occurred to me several times that we should have got on better, if we had not been quite so genteel. We were so exceedingly genteel, that our scope was very limited.
Charles Dickens
#34. Fiction should be in its way subversive. I don't think books should be neat or gentle or genteel or comforting. I think they should be raw. They should be written as perfectly as possible, but what they do is to stir up, to lance the reader.
Edna O'Brien
#36. I love books, food, music, sleep, people who work, heated arguments, the United States of America, and my wife and children. I dislike politicians, preachers, genteel persons, people who do not work or are on vacation, closed minds, movies, loud noises, and oiliness.
Rex Stout
#37. 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.
Tessa Dare
#38. There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.
Sinclair Lewis
#39. It's worth living abroad to study up on genteel and delicate manners. The maid smiles continuously; she smiles like a duchess on a stage, while at the same time it is clear from her face that she is exhausted from overwork.
Anton Chekhov
#40. Some night soon, I'll sneak back in here and we can eat chocolates until we vomit."
"We're such refined, genteel ladies."
"Please," Lysandra said, waving a manicured hand, "you and I are nothing but wild beasts wearing human skins. Don't even try to deny it.
Sarah J. Maas
#41. Confound my genteel upbringing! I could not think of any name foul enough to call him.
Nancy Springer
#42. Bruno was a musician with the temperament of an anarchist and the breath of a bartender's dishrag. He gave the lie to bookselling as a genteel occupation.
Sheridan Hay
#43. I hate golf. It's the genteel version of seal-clubbing, only not as much fun.
Lauren Beukes
#44. The genteel is a mighty catafalque of service-with-a-smile and flattering solicitude smothering every spontaneous movement of thought or feeling.
Marshall McLuhan
#45. I think we are all disgusted by the way George W. Bush's administration has allowed honesty and candor to seep into the genteel world of international affairs.
David Brooks
#46. The Australian form of self-respect, however rough-and-ready, heart-of-gold, come-and-take-pot-luck-with-us, and matily extrovert it is, essentially, genteel, ingrowing, self-pitying, vanilla-ice-cream hearted, its central fear a fear of intellect.
Hal Porter
#47. A gentleman has ease without familiarity, is respectful without meanness; genteel without affectation, insinuating without seeming art.
Lord Chesterfield
#48. A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.
Terry Pratchett
#49. The very sight of a teapot puts a smile on the face of most people. One cannot help but think of more serene and genteel times. From a whimsical child's teapot to an elegant English Teapot, to collectible teapots that adorn some homes, they are a subtle reminder of all that is good in this world.
Barbara Roberts
#50. Good clothes, when put to the test, survive a change in fortune, as a Roman arch survives the luxury of departed empire.
Arnold Bennett
