Formal Gown Quotes

You look beautiful, ma'am," Ernestine said, delighted with the results of her work. She had drawn Phoebe's hair up into a coil of neatly pinned rolls and curls, winding a velvet ribbon around the base. A few loose curls had been allowed to dangle down the back of her head, which felt a bit strange: she wasn't accustomed to leaving any loose pieces in her usual hairstyles. Ernestine had finished the arrangement by pinning a small, fresh pink rose on the right side of the coil.
The new coiffure was very flattering, but the formal gown had turned out to be far less inconspicuous than Phoebe had expected. It was the pale beige of unbleached linen or natural wool, but the silk had been infused with exceptionally fine metallic threads of gold and silver, giving the fabric a pearly luster. A garland of peonies, roses, and delicate green silk leaves trimmed the deeply scooped neckline, while another flower garland caught up the gossamer-thin silk and tulle layers of the skirts at one side. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Do you have a formal gown to wear?'
I made a face.
'Of course not.'
'What size are you?'
'Size awesome.'
He gave me a blank stare.
He didn't get it ~ J.C. McKenzie

What is it about wearing a tuxedo or that little black dress, that makes us feel confident, beautiful, splendid, even invincible?
We put on formal wear and suddenly we become extraordinary.
On the days when you feel low and invisible, why not try this on for size: imagine you are wearing a fantastic tailored tuxedo or a stunning formal gown.
And then proceed with your day. ~ Vera Nazarian

We talked about desire and being jealous,
Our conversation a loose single gown
Or a white picnic tablecloth spread out
Like a book of manners in the wilderness. ~ Seamus Heaney

I hate to do what everybody else is doing. Why, only last week, on Fifth Avenue and some cross streets, I noticed that every feminine citizen of these United States wore an artificial posy on her coat or gown. I came home and ripped off every one of the really lovely refrigerator blossoms that were sewn on my own bodices. ~ Carolyn Wells

Even in her cap and gown Susan looked like a sunrise, extravagant and full of promise. Wherever she went things seemed, as they always did, to organize around her. ~ Robert B. Parker

So much for yesterday. Today, Sophie's formal education must begin. Dressing the lamb before the kill, as Mrs Castaway once put it, when Sugar dared to ask what, exactly, education is. ~ Michel Faber

Ethan's gaze returned to the swell of her breast above the top of her gown. "Cord once mentioned a room here at Sheffield House on the second floor, rather out of the way,I understand, and rarely used.I don't think anyone would miss us if we disappeared for a while, do you?"
Her pulse quickened. She couldn't look away from the smoky heat in his eyes or the sensual curve of his lips. They were equally matched, she thought, and perfectly mated,her mind slipping ahead to what would happen in that room. "No,I don't believe they would miss us in the least."
His look burned hotter. He glanced at the crush of people surrounding them, spoke just loudly enough for them to hear. "Come,my love.It's a bit warm in here.Why don't we take a stroll in the garden?"
Grace bit back a smile. "That is a very good notion,my lord.I believe the night is clear enough for us to see the stars.The Great Bear and the Little Lion should be visible tonight and I am ever so eager to see them."
Ethan's smile held a trace of amusement that disappeared beneath a look of sensual heat. ~ Kat Martin

In our most Puritan of society, gambling-like other pleasures-is either taxed, restricted to certain hours, or forbidden altogether. Yet the impulse to gamble remains an eternal aspect of the irrationality of man. It finds outlets in business, war, politics, in the formal overtures of the gambling casinos, and in the less ceremonious exchanges among individuals of differing opinions. ~ Richard Arnold Epstein

I stood up, suddenly very upset, and took a step away from him. Philip grabbed the hem of my gown. "Wait," he said, laughing. I looked down at him, my hands clenched into fists. "Please don't leave," he said, a cajoling smile turning his lips up charmingly. "I won't do it again." Well, at least he knew why I was upset. But the idea of him not doing it again? Hah! I raised an eyebrow in deep skepticism. "In the next five minutes," he added with a chuckle. ~ Julianne Donaldson

Mrs. Gley came down in a rush. She had on a kind of tea gown whose draperies flew out behind her, like the tail of a blowzy comet. ~ Ross Macdonald

I have no formal training as a writer at all, not even a single English class in college. ~ Scott Westerfeld

You're not going to turn into a wanker, are you?" says Tone, opening a can of larger.
"What do you mean?"
"He means you're not going to get all studenty on us," says Spencer.
"Well, I am a student. I mean, I will be, so, ... "
"No, but I mean you're not gong to get all twatty and up-your-own-arse and come home at Christmas in a gown, talking Latin and saying "one does" and "one thinks" and all that ... "
"Yeah, Tone, that's EXACTLY what I'm going to do. ~ David Nicholls

An amusing, if rather pathetic, case study in miracles is the Great Prayer Experiment: does praying for patients help them recover? Prayers are commonly offered for sick people, both privately and in formal places of worship. Darwin's cousin Francis Galton was the first to analyse scientifically whether praying for people is efficacious. He noted that every Sunday, in churches throughout Britain, entire congregations prayed publicly for the health of the royal family. Shouldn't they, therefore, be unusually fit, compared with the rest of us, who are prayed for only by our nearest and dearest?* Galton looked into it, and found no statistical difference. ~ Richard Dawkins

Sound is the hard currency; meaning is the network of cultural and formal conventions that turns it into a stick of gum at the
candy store. ~ Randy Allen Harris

Lady Penelope Campion- the aging, frazzled, unsightly spinster who...
Who wasn't any of those things. Not by a mile. As fortune would have it, Lady Penelope Campion turned out to be a fair-haired, blue-eyed beauty.
In his mind's eye, he could still see her sprawled across his bed in her dressing gown. Like an all-grown-up Goldilocks, having crept into his house uninvited to test the mattress. Too soft, too hard...?
He didn't know her opinion, but Gabe's reaction was the latter. His cock was in its usual morning prime, standing at full mast. ~ Tessa Dare

I have to console myself with the hope that I'd seen Isabeau soften, even hesitate, as if she might actually have taken my arm. It was suddenly very easy to picture her in a gown with petticoats and ringlets in her hair and diamonds at her throat. It was just as easy to picture Magda with horns and pitchfork. - Logan, page 95 ~ Alyxandra Harvey

He gave the girl a blond-haired Barbie doll from lost and found ... The doll, dressed in ballroom gown and tiara, appeared surprisingly chipper given her emaciated waistline. ~ Anthony Marra

Nonc's pretty okay with the man's death, but the notion that he'll never get dressed again, that he's to die in a gown, seems strange and impossible. ~ Adam Johnson

I now knew a method of speaking and writing that - by means of a refined vocabulary, stately and thoughtful pacing, a determined arrangement of arguments, and a formal orderliness that wasn't supposed to fail - sought to annihilate the interlocutor to the point where he lost the will to object. ~ Elena Ferrante

And in a sense, this terrible situation is the pattern and prototype of all sin: the deliberate and formal will to reject disinterested love for us for the purely arbitrary reason that we simply do not want it. ~ Thomas Merton

Our society has changed greatly in the last 50 years, and workers with college degrees are no longer in short supply. Knowledge gained by formal education, while important, is not superior to knowledge gained by any other means. ~ Jason Navallo

Every day I'd say I look different. Sometimes I look really formal, sometimes I love the classic Stella McCartney, Chloe Sevigny and Gwyneth Paltrow thing. Other days I like being rock star and wearing leather jackets and studs. I love wearing Burberry - it's the perfect combination of formal and punky. ~ Ellie Goulding

A work can do many things at once, and it doesn't have to be just about the world, it could also be about photography, it could be about perception, it could be an exploration of the medium. It could be a document, it could be a visual poetry, and it could be a formal exploration all at the same time. ~ Stephen Shore

One of the main functions of an analogy or model is to suggest extensions of the theory by considering extensions of the analogy, since more is known about the analogy than is known about the subject matter of the theory itself ... A collection of observable concepts in a purely formal hypothesis suggesting no analogy with anything would consequently not suggest either any directions for its own development. ~ Mary Hesse

Government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker; ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another; and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of the national community. ~ John Taylor Gatto

In spite of all the progress we seem to have made, human emotions stay the same. Deep inside our hearts, we don't change very much. This poem was written two thousand years ago or more. It's from a time long before the quatrains and other formal styles you've learned in school were established. And yet, even today, we can understand the feelings of people from that time. You don't need education or scholarship for that. These feelings can be understood by anybody, I think. ~ Kyoichi Katayama

In 'Open City,' there is a passage that any reader of Joyce will immediately recognise as a very close, formal analogue of one the stories in 'Dubliners.' That is because a novel is also a literary conversation. ~ Teju Cole

Practically all of the successful Negroes in this country are of the uneducated type or of that of Negroes who have had no formal education at all. The large majority of the Negroes who have put on the finishing touches of our best colleges are all but worthless in the development of their people. If after leaving school they have the opportunity to give out to Negroes what traducers of the race would like to have it learn such persons may thereby earn a living at teaching or preaching what they have been taught but they never become a constructive force in the development of the race. The so-called school, then, becomes a questionable factor in the life of this despised people. As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching. It kills one's aspirations and dooms him to ~ Carter G. Woodson

Cinder hurried to join her, eager to see what the boys had done. But when she stepped into the sitting room, it was not the decorations that caught her attention first, but Wolf, standing in front of the fireplace altar in his formal black-and-red tuxedo. Thought it had been made especially for him, the jacket still stretched across his broad chest and shoulders, and the red bow tie was almost humorous against his fierce features and lupine bone structure.
Almost.
Despite everything Levana had tried to do to him, Cinder had to admit that he was still handsome, with his olive skin and vivid green eyes and unkempt hair. Most of all, though, it was the look he was giving Scarlet, which would have taken away the breath of any girl.
Kai and Thorne were there, too, each of them standing with their hands in their pockets, rocking back on their heels with supremely smug looks on their faces, like they were daring anyone to suggest it wasn't the most beautiful impromptu wedding ever created. ~ Marissa Meyer

Architecture and urban design, both in their formal and spatial aspects, are seen as fundamentally configurational in that the way the parts are put together to form the whole is more important than any of the parts taken in isolation. ~ Bill Hillier

The questions produced before studying the topic turned out to be much deeper and more exciting. It seemed that the formal study of the topic had quenched students' sense of its mystery. ~ David Perkins

Dressed in a lemon-colored gown made of cashmere, with sleeves of a silk so thin it was referred to by dressmakers as peau de papillon, or "butterfly skin," Lily was breathtakingly beautiful. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Justices look solemn in their formal black robes, but every so often they like to have a little fun by taking on a strange case, or overturning a presidential election, that sort of thing. ~ Christopher Buckley

Have you forgotten me?
by Nancy B. Brewer

The bricks I laid or the stitches I sewed.
I was the one that made the quilt; a drop of blood still shows from my needle prick.
Your wedding day in lace and satin, in a dress once worn by me.
I loaned your newborn baby my christening gown, a hint of lavender still preserved.

Do you know our cause, the battles we won and the battles we lost?
When our soldiers marched home did you shout hooray!
Or shed a tear for the fallen sons.

What of the fields we plowed, the cotton, the tobacco and the okra, too.
There was always room at my table for one more,
Fried chicken, apple pie, biscuits and sweet ice tea.

A time or two you may have heard our stories politely told.
Some of us are famous, recorded on the pages of history.
Still, most of us left this world without glory or acknowledgment.

We were the first to walk the streets you now call home,
Perhaps you have visited my grave and flowers left,
but did you hear me cry out to you?

Listen, my child, to the voices of your ancestors.
Take pride in our accomplishments; find your strength in our suffering.
For WE are not just voices in the wind, WE are a living part of YOU! ~ Nancy B. Brewer

But to this day - I'm very literate now, I love to read, I read constantly - words don't resonate the way they do to a person with a formal education. They're like a maze, a puzzle that has to be opened up. ~ Lance Henriksen

The difference between [socialism and fascism] is superficial and purely formal, but it is significant psychologically: it brings the authoritarian nature of a planned economy crudely into the open. The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal. ~ Ayn Rand

Every human being asks pertinent questions regarding how to live, what to believe in, and what we aspire to become. Throughout life, we question what desires and principles to value and prioritize – love, friendship, freedom, happiness, creativity, wealth, security. We make difficult decisions based upon what we trust constitutes ethical behavior. We balance out work and play by considering what a person's time is worth. We encounter both joyful and unpleasant physical experiences. As we age, we modify some of our youthful assumptions and question the existence of a mystical and divine world. We engage in formal and informal educational activities, which edifying foundation support modest or dramatic shifts in our instinctive and learned behavior patterns, and alter our intellectual and emotional perspective. Each person aspires to live honorably and age gracefully despite encountering physical adversity, financial hardships, sickness, or injury. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Whenever we pride ourselves upon finding a newer, stricter way of thought or exposition ... we lose something of the ability to think new thoughts. And equally, of course, whenever we rebel against the sterile rigidity of formal thought and exposition and let our ideas run wild, we likewise lose. As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of lose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science. ~ Gregory Bateson

When my mother took her turn to sit in a gown at her graduation, she thought she only had two career options: nursing and teaching. She raised me and my sister to believe that we could do anything, and we believed her. ~ Sheryl Sandberg

While the primary function of formal Buddhist meditation is to create the possibility of the experience of "being," my work as a therapist has shown me that the demands of intimate life can be just as useful as meditation in moving people toward this capacity. Just as in formal meditation, intimate relationships teach us that the more we relate to each other as objects, the greater our disappointment. The trick, as in meditation, is to use this disappointment to change the way we relate. ~ Mark Epstein

She was wearing a gown of lilac pink threaded with silver and stitched with tiny pearls. It was gorgeous in itself, and of course had the perfect new skirt, but it did not flatter her as a cooler shade would have done. ~ Anne Perry

Materialism and spirituality are two pretty racquets with which charlatans in cap and gown make the same ball fly. ~ Honore De Balzac

Nice. A shaggy, all-purpose word to be used sparingly in formal composition ~ William Strunk Jr.

I have never been impressed by the formal schools of ethics. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

That is, for a mathematical Platonist, what the C.H. proofs really show is that set theory needs to find a better set of core axioms than classical ZFS, or at least it will need to add some further postulates that are-like the Axiom of Choice-both "self-evident" and Consistent with classical axioms. If you're interested, Godel's own personal view was that the Continuum Hypothesis is false, that there are actually a whole (Infinity Symbol) of Zeno-type (Infinity Symbol)s nested between (Aleph0) and c, and that sooner or later a principle would be found that proved this. As of now no such principle's ever been found. Godel and Cantor both died in confinement, bequeathing a world with no finite circumference. One that spins, now, in a new kind of all-formal Void. Mathematics continues to get out of bed. ~ David Foster Wallace