Emily Dickinson Quotes

In affluent communities, where each member is keenly aware of his or her place within the Byzantine order, attracting the right friends is a blood sport. Chumming up to influential figures who are in a position to help can determine the course of an entire life.

I always wanted so much glamour in my life, so I have always been obsessed with class, and from dating a few people who were from old money and a few from new money in my 20s, I just sort of became obsessed with this idea of clueless rich people.

There's no snobbery in me.

The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It's fine to be a pop star. 'Oh, it's great, lots of fun, aren't they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!'

I always say that the characters in Jane Austen's original books are rather like zombies because they live in this bubble of immense wealth and privilege and no matter what's going on around them they have a singular purpose to maintain their rank and to impress others.

What's funny is that the idea of popularity - even the use of the word 'popular' - is something that had been mostly absent from my life since junior high. In fact, the hallmark of life after junior high seemed to be the shedding of popularity as a central concern.

I don't understand all about New York society. It's only when they are in trouble that I'm really interested.

Of course the lower classes have always felt downtrodden and aspired to a better life. But there is this theory that people respond to a class structure in England - there was a time when people knew who they were and knew whom they served and as long as management wasn't abusive, it was a good life for people.

Americans sometimes say to me that they have no class system themselves. All human beings have class systems. It can be based on a different thing in a different country, but the thing about breeding is, you can't buy it. You can't buy class.

I've always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you're doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy.

At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the city.

Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions.

The greater the privilege, the more hidden the arrogance. The Emperor of China need not exist.

Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits which we call fine - courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing - can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't have the warpings of ignorance and necessity.

The true pleasure of life is to live with your inferiors.

The Great slight the men of wit, who have nothing but wit; the men of wit despise the Great, who have nothing but greatness; the good man pities them both, if with greatness or wit they have not virtue.

Those who live in the best cliffs think they are better than us. That is always man's attitude when he has power.

I grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in a nouveau riche world, where money was spent wildly, and I'm still living in one!... The private schools are all jammed with long waiting lists; the clubs -- all the old clubs -- are jammed with long waiting lists today; the harbors are clogged with yachts; there has never been a more material society than the one we live in today.... Where is this 'vanished world' they talk about? I don't think the critics have looked out the window!

People are fascinated by the rich: Shakespeare wrote plays about kings, not beggars.

It is terribly important to do certain things, such as wear overembroidered dresses. After all, the mass follows class. Class never follows mass.

What is meant by its nature for the highest and the best, spreads among the lowly people.

The same amount of pride which makes a man treat haughtily his inferiors, makes him cringe servilely; to those above him.

While the proximate ground of discrimination may be of another kind, still the pervading principle and abiding test of good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and patent waste of time.

A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of non pertinent correspondence, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of our prosperity.