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“This was the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire, and yet it was a body from which all desire had been eliminated.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“He wore a tiny turquoise stud earring I always associated with Dungeons and Dragons types. Men who own ferrets and think magic tricks are cool.”
― Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

“One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“Reflection may be essential to a scholar, but it’s taboo in social intercourse.”
― Natsume Sōseki, Light and Darkness

“All the joys—animal and human—of a free life are mine. I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary. I am entering into the truth, into nature.”
― Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa

“I hate to go mincing through life, afraid to take a single long step for fear somebody is watching. I want to "wave my wild tail and walk by my wild lone." There wasn't a bit of real harm in my opening that window and talking to Perry. There wasn't even any harm in his trying to kiss me. He just did it to tease me. Oh, I hate conventions. As you say, hang consequences.'

'But we can't hang 'em, Pussy - that's just the trouble. They're more likely to hang us.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs

“I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so.
In moments like this, I can feel your heart beating as clearly as I can feel my own and I know that separation is an illusion, for my life extends far beyond the limitations of me.”
― David Mitchell

“People may make fun of me because I’m wearing something odd, but it’s still good to be alive.”
― Natsume Sōseki

“The average man lives, and must live, so wholly in convention, that gunpowder charges of the truth are more apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either he cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer round that little idol of part-truths and part-conveniences which is the contemporary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets what is old, and becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New truth is only useful to supplement the old; rough truth is only wanted to expand, not to destroy, our civil and often elegant conventions.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Books Which Have Influenced Me: A Paper Contributed to the British Weekly, May 13, 1887

“Oh, as Dean says, nobody is free - never, except just for a few brief moments now and then, when the flash comes, or when as on my haystack night, the soul slips over into eternity for a little space. All the rest of our years we are slaves to something - traditions - conventions - ambitions - relations.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs

“PPROBLEM: You "forget" to take off your shoes in the house.

SOLUTION: There's no solution to this. She'll divorce you if you don't take off your shoes.”
― Phil Schwarzmann, How to Marry a Finnish Girl

“In no time we roll into Sedona proper and find a Cirlce K. The place is full of men with silver ponytails and ratty sandals, old hippie women in loose flowing pants grinning vacantly as they molest the produce, and I am reminded of my old neighborhood in San Francisco. We buy enough fruit and bread and jerked meat for three days, as well as a couple spare handlers of SoCo and a big bottle of cheap Chianti for me. As I'm paying I wonder at how we cling so relentlessly to the little conventions like commerce, as though they can save us.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“If women patronize the wheel the number of buyers will be twice as large. If women ride they must, when riding, dress more rationally than they have been wont to do. If they do this many prejudices as to what they may be allowed to wear will melt away. Reason will gain upon precedent and ere long the comfortable, sensible, and artistic wardrobe of the rider will make the conventional style of woman's dress absurd to the eye and unenduring to the understanding. A reform often advances most rapidly by indirection. An ounce of practice is worth a ton of theory; and the graceful and becoming costume of woman on the bicycle will convince the world that has brushed aside the theories, no matter how well constructed, and the arguments, no matter how logical, of dress-reformers.”
― Frances E. Willard, How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle: Reflections of an Influential 19th Century Woman

“Nor does she attend conventions any more: she’s seen enough kids dressed up like vampires and bunnies and Star Trek, and especially like the nastier villains of Alphinland. She really can’t bear one more inept impersonation of Milzreth of the Red Hand �� yet another apple-cheeked innocent in quest of his inner wickedness.”
― Margaret Atwood, Stone Mattress: Nine Tales

“It is not difficult to stand above the conventions when we leave no hostages among them; men can always be more unconventional than women, and a bachelor of independent means need encounter no difficulties at all.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“The greatest thing about our times is that you don't need permission to express yourself the way you wish. Sometimes people tell themselves they can't do it, because they're missing this or that, but historically, specialization is a recent convention. Most of us are born natural polymaths.”
― Nuno Roque

“In the novels, it always seemed best to keep the suspect talking. Inevitably, help would arrive. I really held out no hope for such an opportune occurrence, but it seemed the best course of action would be to distract her until I could determine what to do.”
― Ashley Weaver, Murder at the Brightwell

“Sure enough, standing with their backs to the hall fire, were Aunt Sadie, Aunt Emily, and a small, fair, and apparently young man. My immediate impression was that he did not seem at all like a husband. He looked kind and gentle.”
― Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love

“Over time, I discovered that learning new things doesn't always liberate you. Instead it makes you wonder if your pants are on backward or if the trees are holding the sky up - it makes you question all of your assumptions and conventions.”
― Dee Williams

“Ils et elles, poussés par leur instinct vers une nouvelle naissance, s'enfermaient, avant l'expulsion, dans des matrices chaudes et demi-obscures où, secoués par des pulsations sonores, ils perdaient les derniers fragments de préjugés et de conventions qui leur collaient encore par-ici et par-là aux articulations, au sexe ou à la cervelle.”
― René Barjavel, La Nuit des temps

“Now, why was diagonal cutting better than cutting straight across? Because the corner of a triangularly cut slice gave you an ideal first bite. In the case of rectangular toast, you had to angle the shape into your mouth, as you angle a big dresser through a hall doorway: you had to catch one corner of your mouth with one corner of the toast and then carefully turn the toast, drawing the mouth open with it so that its other edge could clear; only then did you chomp down. Also, with a diagonal slice, most of the tapered bite was situated right up near the front of your mouth, where you wanted it to be as you began to chew; with the rectangular slice, a burdensome fraction was riding out of control high on the dome of the tongue. One subway stop before mine, I concluded that there had been logic behind the progress away from the parallel and toward the diagonal cut, and that the convention was not, as it might first have appeared, merely an affection of short-order cooks.”
― Nicholson Baker

“There are things in life that science will never be able to see.”
― Pawan Mishra, Coinman: An Untold Conspiracy

“While we've painted the guardians of the pale in a somewhat reactionary light, let's give the gatekeepers their due. What lies beyond the pale isn't always safe and secure. Outside the fence of state-sanctioned consciousness, there are, to be sure, peaks of profound insight and inspiration. But there are also the swamps of addiction, superstition, and groupthink, where the unprepared can get stuck.”
― Steven Kotler, Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work

“So what happened . . . with Rupert?' I asked at last. I was genuinely curious. If I were to be murdered tonight by a deranged killer, I should hate to do it with questions still lingering in my mind.”
― Ashley Weaver, Murder at the Brightwell

“The way earlier societies seem obviously absurd and cruel gives a kind of horror at the forces that must be at work in our own, but suggests that any society must have dramatically satisfying and dangerous conventions; and people can put up with almost any political conditions, either because they are lazy or because they are
ambitious.”
― William Empson, Collected Poems

“standard forms are sometimes called conventions, conventions are mightier than armies, police, and prisons. each citizen becomes the enforcer, the doorkeeper, an instrument of the Law, an unfeeling guard punching his fellow man hard in the belly.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin

“Let’s not fall into the trap of conventions and habits and convince ourselves that the way we are consuming now is next to impossible to alter because of regulated options, economic limitations, cultural norms, accessibility, or whichever excuse we come up with. Let’s remember that just as it is momentarily the norm to mindlessly shop and consume, it could easily become the new norm not to; to radically reduce one’s consumption and to focus on the usage and aesthetic nourishment of the objects one owns and invests in. Something being the norm doesn’t mean that it is carved in stone. Norms are changeable. Not easily changeable, but nevertheless changeable. Cherishing, mending, and repairing one’s belongings could become the new normal.”
― Kristine H. Harper, Anti-trend, Resilient Design and the Art of Sustainable Living

“TV and the movies have spoiled the most intimate moments of our lives. They have given us conventions which dominante our expectations in instants whose intensity would ordinarily make them spontaneous and unique. We have conventions of grief,which we learned from the Kennedys, and ordained gestures for victory by which we imitate the atheletes we see on the tube, who in turn have learned the same things from other jocks they saw on TV. Seduction, too, has got its standards now, its slow-eyed moments, its breathless repartee, and in an instance such as this we end up coming on smooth and wry and bravely composed, like all those gorgeous, poised movietime couples probably because we have no other idea of how to behave.”
― Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent

“Maybe Democritus did not understand that matter, as a convention or the world of atoms that makes the whole Universe, including our brain, which “rules�� the senses and cognition, is the same convention. However, an atom is a convention. The World is a Convention of the Absolute. The conventions must be relative; only the Absolute is unconventional, but only by and through conventions are the world and life possible.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Since almost everything we see (or do not see) is a matter of “convention,�� we can say that all we see is the result of our perception. The picture of “reality�� and the world depends on our perception. Although we all see the same things (with slight differences measured in nuances), the same colors, and the same shapes, this does not change the fact that it all results from our perception. On the other hand, we are not the creators of our perceptions but the beneficiaries. The only difference we make is in the endless nuances and possibilities despite the limits of our perceptive powers.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE