No Dress Sense Quotes & Sayings

In clothes as well as speech, the man of sense Will shun all these extremes that give offense, Dress unaffectedly, and, without haste, Follow the changes in the current taste. — Moliere

Klaus Toppmoller: hair like David Gower and dress sense like Austin Powers. — Jon Champion

I seem to have no dress sense at all. I'm always being listed in New York among one of the ten worst dressed men of the year. Someone once described me as "looking like an unmade bed." He was right! — Orson Welles

To the Muslim woman, the hijab provides a sense of empowerment. It is a personal decision to dress modestly according to the command of a genderless Creator; to assert pride in self, and embrace one's faith openly, with independence and courageous conviction. — Randa Abdel-Fattah

Because I have conducted my own operas and love sheep-dogs; because I generally dress in tweeds, and sometimes, at winter afternoon concerts, have even conducted in them; because I was a militant suffragette and seized a chance of beating time to The March of the Women from the window of my cell in Holloway Prison with a tooth-brush; because I have written books, spoken speeches, broadcast, and don't always make sure that my hat is on straight; for these and other equally pertinent reasons, in a certain sense I am well known. — Ethel Smyth

What had survived - maybe all that had survived of Trism - was Liir's sense of him. A catalog of impressions that arose from time to time, unbidden and often upsetting. From the sandy smell of his sandy hair to the locked grip of his muscles as they had wrestled in sensuous aggression - unwelcome nostalgia. Trism lived in Liir's heart like a full suit of clothes in a wardrobe, dress habillards maybe, hollow and real at once. The involuntary memory of the best of Trism's glinting virtues sometimes kicked up unquietable spasms of longing. — Gregory Maguire

She's only seventeen years old," Llarimar said. "I can't imagine being
married to the God King at her age."
"I can't imagine you being married to the God King at any age, Scoot,"
Lightsong said. Then he pointedly cringed. "Actually, yes I can imagine it,
and the dress looks painfully inelegant on you. Make a note to have my
imagination flogged for its insolence in showing me that par tic u lar sight."
"I'll put it in line right behind your sense of decorum, Your Grace,"
Llarimar said dryly.
"Don't be silly," Lightsong said, taking a sip of wine. "I haven't had one
of those in years. — Brandon Sanderson

She handed Lord Payne a steaming cup, and he took an immediate, reckless draught. A devilish smile curved her way. "Gunpowder tea? Well done, Miss Finch. I do enjoy a lady with a sense of humor."
Now this one ... he was a rake. It was written all over him, in his fine dress and flirtatious manner. He might as well have had the word embroidered on his waistcoat, between the gold-thread flourishes. She knew all about men of his sort. Half the young ladies in Spindle Cove were either fleeing them or pining for them. — Tessa Dare

I adore the challenge of creating truly modern clothes, where a woman's personality and sense of self are revealed. I want people to see the dress, but focus on the woman. — Vera Wang

She was gauche in movement and in a sense, ugly of face, but with how small a twist might she not suddenly have become beautiful. Her sullen mouth was full and rich - her eyes smouldered.
A yellow scarf hung loosely around her neck. Her shapeless dress was a flaming red.
For all the straightness of her back she walked with a slouch.
"Come here," said Lord Groan as she was about to pass him and the doctor.
"Yes father," she said huskily.
"Where have you been for the last fortnight, Fuchsia?"
"Oh, here and there, father," she said, staring at her shoes. She tossed her long hair and it flapped down her back like a pirate's flag. She stood in about as awkward a manner as could be conceived. Utterly unfeminine - no man could have invented it. — Mervyn Peake

Astrid Dane. . . Her long colorless hair was woven back into a braid, and her porcelain skin bled straight into the edges of her tunic. Her entire outfit was fitted to her like armor; the collar of her shirt was high and rigid, guarding her throat, and the tunic itself ran from chin to wrist to waist, less out of a sense of modesty, Kell was sure, than protection. Below a gleaming silver belt, she wore fitted pants that tapered into tall boots (rumor had it that a man once spat at her for refusing to wear a dress; she'd cut off his lips). The only bits of color were the pale blue of her eyes and the greens and reds of the talismans that hung from her neck and wrists and were threaded through her hair. . .
"I smell something sweet," she said. She'd been gazing up at the ceiling. Now her eyes wandered
down and landed on Kell. "Hello, flower boy. — V.E Schwab

Sense never fails to give them that have it, Words enough to
make them understood. It too often happens in some conversations,
as in Apothecary Shops, that those Pots that are Empty, or have
Things of small Value in them, are as gaudily Dress'd as those that
are full of precious Drugs.
They that soar too high, often fall hard, making a low and level
Dwelling preferable. The tallest Trees are most in the Power of the
Winds, and Ambitious Men of the Blasts of Fortune. Buildings have
need of a good Foundation, that lie so much exposed to the
Weather. — William Penn

(Of course there are gay Betas: the Beta Male boyfriend is highly prized in the gay community because you can teach him how to dress yet you can remain relatively certain that he will never develop a fashion sense or be more fabulous than you.) — Christopher Moore

My mum taught me a lot about fashion in terms of knowing what looks good on you and developing my own sense of style. Even when we were shooting the Sunglass Hut campaign, we went through racks of clothing together, and ultimately I decided on a short, more fitted peplum dress, while Mum opted for a sexy blazer and black leggings. — Georgia May Jagger

Who wouldn't love this jargon we dress common sense in: "formal innovation is no longer transformative, having been co-opted by the forces of stabilization and post-industrial inertia," blah, blah. But this co-optation might actually be a good thing if it helped keep younger writers from being able to treat mere formal ingenuity as an end in itself. MTV-type co-optation could end up a great prophylactic against cleveritis - you know, the dreaded grad-school syndrome of like "Watch me use seventeen different points of view in this scene of a guy eating a Saltine." The real point of that shit is "Like me because I'm clever" - which of course is itself derived from commercial art's axiom about audience-affection determining art's value. — David Foster Wallace

Surely, our greatest parental hope is that our children attain a state of righteousness. It is the only sure road to happiness. But to attain such a state requires that they be decent as well as compliant. I know many, many young people who are not "righteous" in the usual sense. But they are wonderfully decent people with many praiseworthy qualities. They are not "devout" in the sense that they attend church faithfully, dress or groom themselves traditionally, or publicly declare their devotions, but they are kind, honest, hard working, concerned for others, and unselfish. — Glenn I. Latham

Well, possibly," I said, feeling my lips twitch again. "But maybe first you would tell us why you chose to manifest yourself in the form of Shirley Temple as last seen on the 'Good Ship Lollipop'?"
The demon twirled around, its big pink sash fluttering as it smoothed down its dress and frilly little petticoat. "My grotesque form isn't making you sick with fright?"
We both shook our heads, Noelle with a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. "Shirley Temple at her pinnacle was frightening," I finally told it, "but not in the sense I think you mean. — Katie MacAlister

Any child who is self-sufficient , who can ties his shoes, dress or undress himself, reflects in his joy and sense of achievement the image of human dignity which is derived from a sense of independence. — Maria Montessori

I have always enjoyed watching women dress. The appeal isn't sexual. Most girls' first glimpse of private female life is watching their mothers dress and put makeup on. It makes sense that we'd find it comforting. Childhood fascinations often crystallize this way. Isn't beauty forever defined, in a sense, by the first things we found beautiful? Surely part of my pleasure results from the inundation of images that we all experience. But I also love ritual, and it is a mesmerizing one. I enjoy the ritual of dressing myself, too. It is a form of basking in a kind of femininity that I am opposed to as an ideal, but for better or worse, I think we all fetishize the female body, and intellectualization doesn't spare anyone the obsession. — Melissa Febos

Let's be shameless. Be greedy. Pursue pleasure. Avoid pain. Wear and touch and eat and drink what we feel like. Tolerate other women's choices. Seek out the sex we want and fight fiercely against the sex we do not want. Choose our own causes And once we break through and change the rules so our sense of our own beauty cannot be shaken, sing that beauty and dress it up and flaunt it and revel in it. — Naomi Wolf

For me, reading that scene never fails to bring on a brief, scalding instant of recognition in recalling exactly what it was like to be a tiny little kid, your whole sense of being so lumpy and vulnerable that the smallest things were everything, and the everything could be so unspeakably wonderful, and the wonderful could be snatched away in an instant, leaving a big ragged hole in your universe just like the one in Laura's dress. — Wendy McClure

A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to want to take it off you — Francoise Sagan

I'm so sorry," she says, and she's wringing her hands, looking away from me. "I'm so, so sorry."
I notice what she's wearing.
It's a dark-green dress with fitted sleeves; a simple cut made of stretch cotton that clings to the soft curves of her figure. It complements the flecks of green in her eyes in a way I couldn't have anticipated. It's one of the many dresses I chose for her. I thought she might enjoy having something nice after being caged as an animal for so long. And I can't quite explain it, but it gives me a strange sense of pride to see her wearing something I picked out myself.
"I'm sorry," she says for the third time.
I'm again struck by how impossible it is that she's here. In my bedroom. Staring at me without my shirt on. Her hair is so long it falls to the middle of her back; I have to clench my fists against this unbidden need to run my hands through it. She's so beautiful. — Tahereh Mafi

Heavens protect us from the dress sense of American academics. — Neil Gaiman

Oh," Cretia said, raking her with a smug sneer. "She's your bodyguard. I get it now. Makes sense, since she has more testosterone than both of you combined." She drifted off. Zarya glared at him as he finally released her. "You should have let me rip her hair out by the dyed roots." Maris tsked at her. "Oh please. The last thing you want to do is get her acidic blood on your beautiful dress. Think of the poor designer who'd curse you for the affront to his hard work." "Yes, — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Tracker Marks was of a different opinion. Though he seemed more white than a white man, he had no time for their ways. For him his dress, his deportment was no different than staying downwind in the shadows of trees when hunting, blending into the world of those he hunted, rather than standing out from it. Once he had excelled at the emu dance & the kangaroo dance; then his talent led him to the whitefella dance, only now no-one was left of his tribe to stand around the fire & laugh & praise his talent for observation & stealthy imitation.
The whites have no law, he told Capois Death, no dreaming. Their way of life made no sense whatsoever. Still, he did not hate them or despise them. They were stupid beyond belief, but they had a power, & somehow their stupidity & their power were, in Tracker Marks's mind, inextricably connected. But how? he asked Capois Death. How can power & ignorance sleep together? Questions to which Capois Death had no answer. — Richard Flanagan

I really do feel now that the way I dress onstage and for work is a true reflection of my own sense of style as well. — Rachel Stevens

I love to dress up. You have to have a sense of fun in life, too. We can all be serious and work and do our bit, but every now and again you have to have a good giggle. — Marie-Chantal Claire

I can't bear shopping. I can choose clothes for my characters, but not for myself. I've got no dress sense. Or I've lost it. — Richard C. Armitage

A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over. And I maintain that if a person can put a few common sense facts into a song and dress them up in a cloak of humor, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read. — Joe Hill

By the time we leave, I have red lips and curled eyelashes, and I'm wearing a bright red dress. And there's a knife strapped to the inside of my knee. This all makes perfect sense. — Veronica Roth

By starving myself into society's beauty ideal, I had compromised my success, my independence, and my quality of life. Being overweight was really no different. It was just the "f - you" response to the same pressure. I was still responding to the pressure to comply to the fashion industry's standards of beauty, just in the negative sense. I was still answering to their demands when really I shouldn't have been listening to them at all. The images of stick-thin prepubescent girls never should have had power over me. I should've had my sights set on successful businesswomen and successful female artists, authors, and politicians to emulate. Instead I stupidly and pointlessly just wanted to be considered pretty. I squandered my brain and my talent to squeeze into a size 2 dress while my male counterparts went to work on making money, making policy, making a difference. — Portia De Rossi

I do think younger women have to figure out how to combine their own sense of style with what is appropriate and authoritative. Some young women think there's no reason why they can't wear flip flops in the office in the summer because their accomplishments should exempt them from a stodgy dress code. — Robin Givhan

But even then, even all those years when she was never physically by herself, she was beginning to feel the chasm growing between her and the rest of the world. It was like a small tear in the seam of a dress, a certain pulling away. A ripping. And once it started, there was no stopping it. Of course, she tried so hard to keep it together, to tether herself to this world. She filled her life with people. With friends and family. But even then she knew that mere presence of people in one's life cannot eliminate the terrifying sense of one's aloneness in the world. Being surrounded by people is not the same as connection. As friendship. As love. When Robert came along, she believed for a little while she had found the answer, the bridge that crossed the deep canyon. And children too became links between herself and normalcy. The accident didn't start it, it just proved the faultiness, the tenuousness of these connections. — T. Greenwood

Girls think they're only allowed to wear dresses on formal occasions, but I like a woman who says, you know, I'm going over to see a boy who is having a nervous breakdown, a boy whose connection to the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and gosh dang it, I am going to wear a dress for him. — John Green

I like to maintain a certain sense of fantasy in my life. I am kind of like that at home. Do I have the full hair and makeup? No. But I might have the nice dress on. — Jennifer Lopez

You are addressed by the way you dress. Your attire reflects your sense of value or taste and of course, your speech either makes or mars you. — Jaachynma N.E. Agu

He's attractive, has perfect dress sense, and doesn't talk. I think I want him to father my babies. (Savannah) — Eden Summers

It is possible to see slavery and serfdom merely as extreme early forms of autocratic management, in which employees had no voice whatsoever in the work process and were viewed not as human beings but as alienated forms of individual wealth. Slavery, in this sense, did not die; it continues in modern dress in contemporary organizations wherever managers exercise autocratic power, unequal status, or arbitrary privileges, no matter how scientific the terminology or postmodern the image — Kenneth Cloke

Epidermal Macabre
Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes,-
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost. — Theodore Roethke

Now look: Droplets of oil were dotted across the front of her best dress, over the mound of her stomach. She was clumsy and fat-stomached and she didn't even have the sense to wear an apron while she was cooking. Also she had paid way too much for this dress, sixty-four dollars at Hecht's, which would scandalize Ira if he knew. How could she have been so greedy? She dabbed at her nose with the back of her hand. Took a deep breath. Well. Anyhow. — Anne Tyler

Strive not for singularity in dress; Fools have the more and men of sense the less. To look original is not worth while, But be in mind a little out of style. — Ambrose Bierce

There was something liberating and terrifying about the first day on a new job. In any new assignment, Bobbie had always had the unsettling feeling that she was in over her head, that she wouldn't know how to do any of the things they would ask her to do, that she would dress wrong or say the wrong thing, or that everyone would hate her. But no matter how strong that feeling was, it was overshadowed by the sense that with a new job came the chance to totally recreate herself in whatever image she chose, that - at least for a little while - her options were infinite. — James S.A. Corey

Often, some people dress something up to make it sound scientific, use scientific words, call themselves doctor something-or-other, and then you look them up, and they're trying to make it sound like something it's not. There's this entire field that's adding the word 'quantum' to everything. It doesn't even make sense in that context. — Elise Andrew

My so-called bad dress-sense phase happened when I was confused - I think I was taking advice all too often, without listening to my inner voice. Add to the fact that I was a little overweight; so every wrong 'outfit' got compounded all that much. — Vidya Balan

If (b) their One is one as indivisible, nothing will have quantity or quality, and so the one will not be infinite, as Melissus says - nor, indeed, limited, as Parmenides says, for though the limit is indivisible, the limited is not.3 But if (c) all things are one in the sense of having the same definition, like 'raiment' and 'dress', then it turns out that they are maintaining the Heraclitean doctrine, (20) for it will be the same thing 'to be good' and 'to be bad', and 'to be good' and 'to be not good', and so the same thing will be 'good' and 'not good', and man and horse; in fact, their view will be, not that all things are one, but that they are nothing; and that 'to be of such-and-such a quality' is the same as 'to be of such-and-such a size'. — Aristotle.

She didn't like to think she was so shallow that a mere dress could make her happy, but she had to concede that it gave her a new sense of self-confidence. — Julia Quinn

What is your least favorite part of the male anatomy?" "Uh ... what?" "Come on." I nudged her shoulder. "You have to have a least favorite part." Marie stared at me for a beat then blinked rapidly. "Really? I just pour out my heart to you and ... ." "Balls," Ashley announced unceremoniously from her place on the floor. Elizabeth snickered. "Oh, my lord." Marie covered her face with her hands and shook her head. I ignored her and leaned closer to Ashley. "I know, right? I mean, shouldn't those things be on the inside?" Janie's thoughtfully distracted voice chimed in. "I feel like the rest of the male body makes a lot of sense. And then ... balls." "Yes!" "It makes me think maybe God is an alien or ran out of alluring parts before he got to the male reproductive system." "They never look nice; it's basically impossible. You can't dress them up, and I've seen a lot of balls in the ER. I've never seen a man's balls and thought to myself, Now that guy has a great set of testicles — Penny Reid

I've always had a really developed sense of justice. As a child, I would rotate my dolls' dresses for fear that they might come alive at midnight and one of them would always have the best dress on. Whatever it was that made me worry about my dolls I suppose has paid off in my career because, really, an actor is all about empathy and imagination. And those are the cornerstones of activism. — Susan Sarandon

Jonah: Viv. Why is that? All the you-were-heres?
Viv: Because it's all so fleeting, isn't it? The ocean existed so long, and some animals. Isn't that crazy? My dress collection will love longer than I ever will. I'm just looking for some kind of permanence, so my mark will linger onthe world once I'm gone, in the places where I found joy. Does that make any sense? — Emery Lord

I wanted a boyfriend who was a Christian but who wasn't uptight about it, who was good-looking and intelligent and had an interesting job and a sense of humor, who said "fuck" when the situation warranted it, who had attempted to but been unable to finish St. Augustine's City of God, who could argue politics with my mother and talk business with my father, who liked Indian food and had nice friends and knew how to dress and would like someday to live abroad. — Sarah Dunn

She had been struck by the figure of a woman's back in a mirror. She stopped and looked. The dress the figure wore was the color called ashes of roses, and Ada stood, held in place by a sharp stitch of envy or th woman's dress and the fine shape of her back and her thick dark hair and the sense of assurance she seemed to evidence in her very posture.
Then Ada took a step forward, and the other woman did too, and Ada realized that it was herself she was admiring, the mirror having caught the reflection of an opposite mirror on the wall behind her. The light of the lamps and the tint of the mirrors had conspired to shift colors, bleaching mauve to rose. She climbed the steps to her room and prepared for bed, but she slept poorly that night, for the music went on until dawn. As she lay awake she thought how odd it had felt to win her own endorsement. — Charles Frazier

That long-gone sense of innocence and trust now reminded her of the feeling she now had when about to put on a new dress, or when given a box of chocolates sealed up in its wrapper. Everything was lovely in the anticipation. There must have been a time, she thought wistfully, when disappointment was an undiscovered emotion. — Juliet Nicolson

In matters of dress we wish neither silk nor rags," President Hinckley said. "We seek for the clean look, call it a wholesome look, the bright and happy look of young men and women who walk with a sense of who they are, of what is expected of them, and of what they may become. — Daniel H. Ludlow

There's no sense drawing attention to yourself, Li." "Hellooooo. I'm aHorseman of the Apocalypse, and I'm betrothed to the most infamous, most powerful demon in existence. I couldn't draw more attention to myself i I wore Lady Gaga's meat dress to a PETA convention. — Larissa Ione

Its time we woke up," pursued Gerald, still inwardly urged to unfamiliar speech. "Women are pretty much people, seems to me. I know they dress like fools - but who's to blame for that? We invent all those idiotic hats of theirs, and design their crazy fashions, and what's more, if a woman is courageous enough to wear common-sense clothes - and shoes - which of us wants to dance with her? — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Whether it's an $11 flip-flop or a $2 key ring or a $2,000 dress, they're all done with integrity. They're all done with a design sense. As long as the creativity exists, then I don't think it's a sellout. A sellout is putting your name on any piece of crap and then expecting people to buy it because it's got your name on it. — Marc Jacobs

In effect, to follow, not to force the public inclination; to give a direction, a form, a technical dress, and a specific sanction, to the general sense of the community, is the true end of legislature. — Edmund Burke