Finishing School Quotes

“Quietly Sophronia added, "And the soot on my dress, sir?"
"I didn't see anything." Professor Braithwope smiled down at her, showing a small hint of fang.
Sophronia grinned back. "I'm glad we understand each other, sir."
The vampire looked out into the night. "This is the right finishing school for you, isn't it, whot?"
"Yes sir, I think it might very well be."
"A piece of advice, Miss Temminnick?"
"Sir?"
"It is a great skill to have friends in low places. They, too, have things to teach you."
"Now, sir, I thought you didn't see any soot.”
― Gail Carriger, Etiquette & Espionage

“Espionage, Sophronia had learned, was tough on petticoats.”
― Gail Carriger, Waistcoats & Weaponry

“He might have lost his mind, but never his fashion sense.”
― Gail Carriger, Manners & Mutiny

“After every unladylike action, there must be an equal and opposite reaction. Consider the necessary, analyze the consequences, clean up the mess.”
― Gail Carriger, Manners & Mutiny

“Consider the necessary, analyze the consequences, clean up the mess.”
― Gail Carriger, Manners & Mutiny

“It is a valuable thing for an intelligencer to be forgotten.”
― Gail Carriger, Manners & Mutiny

“Shut your cake hole, you revolting young blot.”
― Gail Carriger, Manners & Mutiny

“Most girls recently out of finishing school are like soufflés: puffed up, not very substantial inside, and prone to collapsing at the slightest provocation.”
― Gail Carriger, Blameless

“We like the shadows. That's where all the power is.”
― Gail Carriger, Manners & Mutiny

“Trust is a lot to ask of someone.”
― Gail Carriger, Manners & Mutiny

“There was no way she was staying trapped with tea at a time like this.”
― Gail Carriger, Manners & Mutiny

“We're a team like tea and milk, or cake and custard, or pork and apple.”
― Gail Carriger, Manners & Mutiny

“It didn't feel sporting to shoot at a crazy person, even if that person was a vampire who'd agreed to the job.”
― Gail Carriger, Manners & Mutiny

“I hate missing everything. That's why I want to marry well and be a grand lady. Then I can host all the parties, all the time, and see everything that is going on always. How can you stand not knowing?”
― Gail Carriger, Manners & Mutiny

“Evil genius-ness was like that--showy.”
― Gail Carriger, Manners & Mutiny

“For you, it's gossip. For me, it's action.”
― Gail Carriger, Manners & Mutiny

“Tonight I crash an airship. On purpose.”
― Gail Carriger, Manners & Mutiny

“Keep moving in the direction of your dreams. No matter how slows it may seems, stay focus, you will get to the finish line.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“With or without money, the work must be done.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“He thought of the Finishing School for Barbies where long-legged, high-breasted, stomachless girls went to get shaved clean, get their toenails painted pink, their nipples removed, and all body opening sewn shut, except for their mouths, which curved in perpetual smiles and led nowhere.”
― Kate Wilhelm, Kate Wilhelm in Orbit, Volume One

“If school days are the happiest of your life, I'm hanging myself with my skip-rope tonight.”
― Jackie Kennedy Onassis

“Never talk to waiters like that," Kit said.

"Can I help it," he said, "if I only went one year to finishing school?"

"It isn't manners," she said like a sensible schoolteacher quietly disciplining a small boy, "it just isn't smart."

I thought of the time I first told him not to say ain't. He took this the same way, a little peeved but making mental notes. I noticed he was never too much of an egotist to take criticism when he knew it would help. It was part of his genius for self-propulsion. I was beginning to see what Kit had for Sammy. Of course she stood for something never within his reach before. But it was more than that. Sammy seemed to know that his career was entering a new cycle where polish paid off. You could almost see him filing off the rough edges against the sharp blade of her mind.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“At the age of eleven she had been taken from the third grade in public school and sent to an exclusive seminary for the double purpose of gaining social prestige and concealing her mental incapacity. At sixteen when her instructors had about despaired of her, they were overjoyed by the decision of her father to send the girl to a "finishing school" in the North. The "finishing school" about finished what intelligence Helen possessed; but she came forth, four years later, more beautiful, with a better knowledge of how to dress and how to act in exclusive society, enough superficialities to enable her to get by in the "best" circles and a great deal of that shallow facetiousness that passes for sophistication in American upper-class life. A winter in Manhattan had rounded out her education. Now she was back home, thoroughly ashamed of her grotesque parents, and, like the other girls of her set, anxious to get a husband who at the same time was handsome, intelligent, educated, refined and rolling in wealth. As she was ignorant of the fact that no such man existed, she looked confidently forward into the future.”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More