Proper Dress Quotes & Sayings

The truth is overrated. — Paul Westerberg

Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Wolfe, I don't like proper dress while working. I like writing in pajama-like clothing, which eases and relaxes me and allows me to connect with the decidedly improper. — Chang-rae Lee

When Prince Napoleon, the cousin of Napoleon Bonaparte III, visited Washington in early August, Mary organized an elaborate dinner party. She found the task of entertaining much simpler than it had been in Springfield days. "We only have to give our orders for the dinner, and dress in proper season," she wrote her friend Hannah Shearer. Having learned French when she was young, she conversed easily with the prince. It was a "beautiful dinner," Lizzie Grimsley recalled, "beautifully served, gay conversation in which the French tongue predominated." Two days later, her interest in French literature apparently renewed, Mary requested Volume 9 of the Oeuvres de Victor Hugo from the Library of Congress. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

It was a little blue cotton-knit dress with tiny daisies all over it, and it was tighter than Gran liked and shorter than Jason deemed proper in his sister. — Charlaine Harris

I needed an adult female wearing a tight sleeveless cheongsam mini-dress to help me learn Chinese. All my senses would have to focus; otherwise I would end up knowing nothing. Tracing each Chinese character upon the small of her back with my index finger was only proper way to begin a lesson. — Matt Muller

Glancing at Danika, I notice she isn't wearing her normal 'look at me, all proper' style. Instead she has on jeans, a red t-shirt with the image of a smiling mushroom on it, and a pair of tennis shoes.
"Wow, you look ... different."
She cast a peek down at her clothes. "This was always my preferred style, but I thought I had to dress prim and proper to be taken seriously. But you know what I realized when I met you?"
"What?"
She takes a step forward, placing her hand over my heart. "It's not about appearances, it's about heart. — Brandy Nacole

At the window he sits and looks out, musing on the river, a little brown hen duck paddling upstream among the windwaves close to the far bank. What he has understood lies behind him like a road in the woods. He is a wilderness looking out at the wild. — Wendell Berry

I would waste thirty minutes a day, standing in front of a mirror that I never had any inclination to really pay proper attention to. And even after I made myself up for nothing, I was still derided and abused for it. It was rather like putting a dress on a bear and pretending it was beautiful. — Michelle Franklin

As Colin Wilson has written, "modern civilisation, with its mechanised rigidity is producing more outsiders than ever before-people who are too intelligent to do some repetitive job, but not intelligent enough to make their own terms with society." Those "intelligent enough" to make their own terms with society are what we will later refer to as artists of life. The outsider views himself as a product of a culture he rejects-the artist views himself as a culture-builder. — Laurence Boldt

Till now, I could not have supposed it possible to be mistaken as to a girl's being out or not. A girl not out, has always the same sort of dress: a close bonnet, for instance; looks very demure, and never says a word. You may smile, but it is so, I assure you; and except that it is sometimes carried a little too far, it is all very proper. Girls should be quiet and modest. The most objectionable part is, that the alteration of manners on being introduced into company is frequently too sudden. They sometimes pass in such very little time from reserve to quite the opposite - to confidence! That is the faulty part of the present system. — Jane Austen

I'm a lady. It's none of it mine. Look at you. You're doing well enough - is your wife a rich woman?" He chuckled sheepishly at that. "She's my wife. She does as well as I do. But she doesn't own anything of her own." "It's the same for me," I said. "I do as my father does, as my husband does. I dress as is proper for their wife or their daughter. But I don't own anything on my own account. In that sense I am as poor as your wife." "But you are a Howard and I am a nobody," he observed. "I'm a Howard woman. That means I might be one of the greatest in the land or a nobody like you. It all depends." "On what?" he asked, intrigued. I thought of the sudden darkening of Henry's face when I displeased him. "On my luck. — Philippa Gregory

What enables me to believe in anything is hope. — Ben Harper

There is only one proper way to wear a beautiful dress: to forget you are wearing it. — Delphine De Girardin

The moment the two men entered, she leapt from her seat, knelt, and bowed her head.

"Hey! Watch it, that's a new dress," Hadrian said with a smile.

"Oh!" She scrambled to her feet, blushing, then curtsied and bowed her head once more.

"What's she doing?" Royce whispered to Hadrian.

"Not sure," he whispered back.

"I'm trying to show the proper reverence, Your Lordships," she whispered to both of them while keeping her head down. "I'm sorry if I'm not very good at it."

Royce rolled his eyes and Hadrian began to laugh.

"Why are you whispering?" Hadrian asked her.

"Because you two were. — Michael J. Sullivan

Holy shit. I forgot to ask you what you do. You are seriously a librarian? You aren't fucking with me?" She made a face. "Yes, I'm really a librarian, MLS degree and all." "Hot damn." He pictured her behind a desk, dressed all prim and proper; her hair bound up in a little bun, black-framed glasses perched on her nose. "Remind me later to have you dress up and ask me about my overdue books. — Cynthia Rayne

Samsa sat there for a long time with his eyes closed. Then, making up his mind, he stood, grabbed his black walking stick, and headed for the stairs. He would return to the second floor and figure out the proper way to dress. For now, at least, that would be his mission. The world was waiting for him to learn. — Haruki Murakami

Posture and Social Status...
During the 18th century in European and American society, aspects including station in life, status and dress could easily identify those of financial means. In fact, the garments of this era would hold the wearer in a position that would support and require proper posture. Women, and sometimes men, wore stays in order to shape the torso. Among the more privileged, even children wore stays since people believed these improved their posture and enhanced straight spinal growth. Certain movements were constrained by the cut and design of many garments, including details of the sleeve and back that would hold the person in proper posture. — Cindy Ann Peterson

Esmerine go out briefly to relieve herself, then return and pull off her shift again, her breasts silvery raindrops spilling down her ribs in the moonlight, over Bahram's hands as he warmed them, in that somnolent world of second-watch sex that was one of the beautiful spaces of daily life, the salvation of sleep, the body's dream, so much warmer and more loving than any other part of the day that it was sometimes hard in the mornings to believe it had really happened, that he and Esmerine, so severe in dress and manner, Esmerine who ran the women at their work as hard as Khalid had at his most tryrannical, and who never spoke to Bahram or looked at him except in the most businesslike way, as was only fitting and proper, had in fact been transported together with him to whole other worlds of rapture, in the depths of the night in their bed. As he watched her work in the afternoons, Bahram thought: love changed everything. — Kim Stanley Robinson

The worst sinners, according to Jesus, are not the harlots and publicans, but the religious leaders with their insistence on proper dress and grooming, their careful observance of all the rules, their precious concern for status symbols, their strict legality, their pious patriotism ... the haircut becomes the test of virtue in a world where Satan deceives and rules by appearances. — Hugh Nibley

Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed. — Graham Greene

Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Baseball was, is and always will be to me the best game in the world. — Babe Ruth