• Writing

    Old-School Advice That Still Remains Relevant

    Daily, men and women do a score of things that they know to be hurtful and insane, because they fear to be accounted “peculiar,” and “not quite respectable;” and so it comes about that “the keeping up of appearances,” as it is called, the incessant striving to be popular at all costs, engenders endless hypocrisies and falsehoods, and makes knaves and cowards.– The Blight of Respectability [Geoffrey Mortimer, 1897] It is a common failing to expect another person to keep a secret which we have just proved is beyond our own capability.– The Spinster Book [Myrtle Reed, 1901] We should subdue our gloomy moods before we enter society.  To look…