Behavior in Public Places Quotes

“The act of staring is a thing which one does not ordinarily do to another human being; it seems to put the object stared at in a class apart. One does not talk to a monkey in a zoo, or to a freak in a sideshow— one only stares.”
― Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings

“Morning and lunchtime are times when anyone can appear alone almost anywhere without this giving evidence of how the person is faring in the social world; dinner and other evening activities, however, provide unfavorable information about unaccompanied participants, especially damaging in the case of female participants.”
― Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings

“As a linguist suggests:
" There are messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works (“ Hello, do you hear me?”), to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention (“ Are you listening?” or in Shakespearean diction, “Lend me your ears!”— and on the other end of the wire “Um-hum!”).”
― Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings

“the model of “social order.” Briefly, a social order may be defined as the consequence of any set of moral norms that regulates the way in which persons pursue objectives.”
― Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places

“This qualification aside, I shall use the term gathering to refer to any set of two or more individuals whose members include all and only those who are at the moment in one another’s immediate presence. By the term situation I shall refer to the full spatial environment anywhere within which an entering person becomes a member of the gathering that is (or does then become) present. Situations begin when mutual monitoring occurs, and lapse when the second-last person has left. In order to stress the full extent of any such unit, I will sometimes employ the term situation at large.”
― Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places