Quotes About Table Manners

#1. The smaller the dinner table, the better the side conversation: you can gossip about the guests without fearing whether you will be overheard. It just isn't good table manners to exclude someone from their own ridicule. That's why the juiciest side conversations occur at a table for one.

Bauvard

#2. It was Lord of the Flies without table manners.

Denise Mina

#3. Basil Stag Hare tut-tutted severely as he remarked to Ambrose Spike, 'Tch, tch. Dreadful table manners. Just look at those three wallahs, kicking up a hullaballoo like that! Eating's a serious business.

Brian Jacques

#4. How do you eradicate contempt, especially when that contempt is founded on nothing more substantial than differences in table manners, variations in the structure of the eyelid?

J.M. Coetzee

#5. I don't know why people would want to have lunch with writers. I've eaten with writers. We have appalling table manners, and rarely say anything other than 'Pass the salt' or 'If you're not going to eat that, can I have it?'

Neil Gaiman

#6. A man or woman can be known and respected for good taste, regardless of job or income level, if they make good choices in clothes, have good table manners, are kind and organize their home to look warm, welcoming, clean, and appropriate to their station in life.

Letitia Baldrige

#7. Does my request make sense in terms of my child's age and ability? (Am I expecting an eight-year-old to have perfect table manners?)

Adele Faber

#8. When I am alone, my table manners are rather piggish, but i suppose that's because I don't eat at a table, I eat at my desk. Which could be considered a table, except we tend to define things by their function, and this particular surface is a desk, so perhaps piggish is unfair.

Kelli Jae Baeli

#9. Eating is aggressive by nature, and the implements required for it could quickly become weapons; table manners are, most basically, a system of taboos designed to ensure that violence remains out of the question.

Margaret Visser

#10. Snow's table manners are atrocious - it's like watching a wild dog eat. A wild dog you'd like to slip the tongue.

Rainbow Rowell

#11. I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.

Evelyn Waugh

#12. Vijaya prefers to eat alone. Rob ushered her into the room and held a chair for her, then sat across from her. "Many Indians regard eating as something that should be done in private. Considering the table manners of some of our best people, one can see their point."
Patricia Frances Rowell

Patricia Frances Rowell

#13. Barbarism? That's ironic coming from a woman helping to prepare us for slaughter. And what's she basing our success on? Our table manners?

Suzanne Collins

#14. What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.

Terence McKenna

#15. A very, terribly long time ago,
before such things as television
and good table manners or even
children, ferocious monsters
roamed a younger, angrier world.

Berkeley Breathed

#16. They didn't know why these things were funny. Sometimes you laugh because you've got no more room for crying. Sometimes you laugh because table manners on a beach are funny. And sometimes you laugh because you're alive, when you really shouldn't be.

Terry Pratchett

#17. Domenico had that 'look-at-me I've-got-money' attitude about him. A proper nouveau riche. In combination with his pig-like table manners at home, it was a sight to behold.

K.A. Merikan

#18. Fetch me the money box and some punkwood, will you, my boy? Gannon asked him, licking the honey from his plate. (I fear table manners in the cabin-indeed, all manners-had suffered since Gannon and his son had been left to themselves.)

William D. Burt

#19. The dinner table is the center for the teaching and practicing not just of table manners but of conversation, consideration, tolerance, family feeling, and just about all the other accomplishments of polite society except the minuet.

Judith Martin

#20. Fashionably amusing table manners are a matter of breaking the right rule at the right time.

P. J. O'Rourke

#21. I am single because I am allergic for cursing words and bad table manners

Hiroko Sakai

#22. The only way to have a funeral is to invite everyone who ever knew the person and just wait for the accident to happen-somebody who comes in out of the blue and says the truth. Everything else is table manners.

Philip Roth

#23. One did not depend on marines for good table manners. One depended on them to have the right instincts when it came to matters of life and death.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#24. Malone had been raised by a lady both Irish and Catholic, in a good bourgeois home in which careless table manners were a sin, much less this storm in his heart.

Andrew Holleran

#25. On the Continent people have good food; in England people have good table manners.

George Mikes

#26. it was a point of good manners not to sit with a clique of the same friends all the time, and it meant that conversation at dinner had to be open and general rather than close and gossipy

Philip Pullman

#27. Worse than talking with a mouthful, is gossiping with a mouthful!

Anthony Liccione

#28. Consideration is the basis of etiquette, and it starts at home. If you can't show consideration to your spouse, child or family member any consideration you show outside is shallow and a farce.

Chinha Raheja

#29. Sitting down for dinner not only helps you learn, but also teaches you how to listen - which I feel is the most important skill to have. I remember as a kid going around the table listening to everyone's day. It was hard to have the manners not to interrupt back then.

Michael Symon

#30. I had a friend whose family had dinner together every day. The mother would tuck you in at night and make breakfast in the morning. It just seemed so amazing to me.

Moon Unit Zappa

#31. The children nodded in agreement, and rose from the table. Leaving their dirty breakfast dishes behind, which is not a good thing to do in general but perfectly acceptable in the face of an emergency.

Lemony Snicket

#32. Anisette! You will eat your food, not demonstrate aerial warfare across the table with it.

T.A. Miles

#33. It is said that the hallmark of a gentleman is that he is only ever rude intentionally. Arthur Bryant was no gentleman. His rudeness came from an inability to cloak his opinions in even the most cursory civility. He believed in good manners at the meal table and bad manners almost everywhere else.

Christopher Fowler

#34. It is the good children, Madame, who make the most terrible revolutionaries. They say nothing, they do not hide under the table, they eat only one sweet at a time, but later on, they make Society pay dearly for it!

Jean-Paul Sartre

#35. Never bring a weapon too big to double as a dining utensil to the table when dining with friends.

Seanan McGuire

#36. The way you treat your food on your plate is a reflection of the way you treat people in your life. Learning how to dine teaches you not just how to eat but how to treat people.

Rajiv Talreja

#37. The kitchen table is where we mark milestones, divulge dreams, bury hatchets, make deals, give thanks, plan vacations, and tell jokes. It's also where children learn the lessons that families teach: manners, cooperation, communication, self-control, values.

Doris Christopher

#38. The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - don't necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners ...

Natalie Goldberg

#39. Teaching creativity to your child isn't like teaching good manners. No one can paint a masterpiece by bowing to another person's precepts about elbows on the table.

Gurney Williams