“There are two things that I try to foster above all others in my Castle,” the Countess Maude said. “One of them is rowdiness and the other one of them is politeness. I love rowdy fun games above all, and I love politeness above all things. There was a perfect gentleman who was gunned down, for business reasons, in one of the streets that surround my Castle just yesterday. So he lay in the gutter spouting little fountains of blood. A man came by and looked at him there. “How’re you doing?” the man questioned him. “Dying,” said the perfect gentleman, raising his hat from his head in salute, “but it was kind of you to ask.”
“That is what I call politeness.”
-R. A. Lafferty, East of Laughter (1988), p. 64
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