To seduce a woman famous for strict morals, religious fervour and the happiness of her marriage: what could possibly be more prest...igious?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Children ... seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives..., humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown-up world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Kennedy benefited, too, from the fact that the country perceived him to be, like Roosevelt, a patrician. To be sure, Kennedy did n...ot boast a seventeenth-century lineage or descend from the landed gentry. Yet in other respects they were similar. Both had gone to prestigious prep schools; both were Harvard men; both had sailed the New England coast; each had a sense of noblesse oblige. Like Roosevelt, Kennedy was a man of inherited wealth who could, to a degree, view business from the outside. In comparing Kennedy to Roosevelt, a columnist for the New Republic observed: "Each had an upper-class education, found a life of public service more attractive than money-grabbing, and each had a respect for the decencies. At heart, too, each had a kind of patrician reticence, an impervious private dignity."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everything that was ever to happen to me in the future had its germ or impulse in the conditions of my life on Dover Street. My fr...iendships, my advantages and disadvantages, my gifts, my habits, my ambitions--these were the materials out of which I built my after life, in the open workshop of America. My days in the slums were pregnant with possibilities; it only needed the ripeness of events to make them fruit forth in realities. Steadily as I worked to win America, America advanced to lie at my feet. I was an heir, on Dover Street, awaiting maturity. I was a princess waiting to be led to the throne.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I ...had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman's career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It seemed a long way from 143rd Street. Shaking hands with the Queen of England was a long way from being forced to sit in the col...ored section of the bus going into downtown Wilmington, North Carolina. Dancing with the Duke of Devonshire was a long way from not being allowed to bowl in Jefferson City, Missouri, because the white customers complained about it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »