Class Expectations Quotes

I'd been brought up on the Upper East Side in a WASP society, which was death on crutches.

My mother had all these maxims - like, classy girls never chew gum, never read comic books, never get their ears pierced, never get their hair dyed.

Urban development initiatives must match the aspirations of the middle class and the neo middle class.

One of the disadvantages of being a patrician is that occasionally you're obliged to act like one.

I think I've committed the one really bad English crime, which is I've risen above my station. I was supposed to be a pop star, and suddenly I'm claiming that I'm an artist of some kind.

If you were a successful upper-middle-class Negro girl in the 1950s and '60s, you were, in practice and imagination, a white Protestant upper middle-class girl. Young, good-looking white women were the most desirable creatures in the world. It was hard not to want to imitate them; it was highly toxic, too, as we would learn.

Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.

My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.

We lived in the shadow of our rich relations. Mother was intent on keeping up with the people she was raised with, which was impossible. My father was a physician who wanted to be a rabbi but was weighed down by a great sense of obligation to support his family in style.

Really, if the lower orders don't set a good example, what on earth is the use of them?

People think I was born in top hat and tails.

In my opinion butlers ought To know their place, and not to play The Old Retainer night and day.

Southern women, especially upper-middle-class women, care deeply about appearances and what other people think.