#artie

High school parties exhausted me because I always felt like I was the only thinking person in a room mostly full of morons obliterating precious IQ points with every gulp of whatever booze they managed to steal out of their parents' liquor cabinets. College parties are exhausting in a diametrically opposite way. They are full of smart, funny people who are all used to being the smartest, funniest person in the room, so they spend the whole party talking over one another, overlapping and overtaking the conversation to prove that they are the smartest, funniest person in the room, if not the entire planet. ↗

— Megan McCafferty

#conversation #parties #funny

It's certainly true that I was brought up in that British amateur tradition, the one which always held that if you were reasonably good at cricket, knew one or two Latin texts and a few zingy Oscar Wilde quotes for dinner parties, you were pretty much ready to go and run some outpost in Hindustan. ↗

— Damian Lewis

#amateur #british #brought #certainly #cricket

You know, we have main English language parties, federalist parties, and traditionally the ones to watch would be the Conservatives, who form the government, and then the Liberals. ↗

— Rick Mercer

#english #english language #federalist #form #government

The nightmare is you spend the rest of your life being funny at parties and then people say, 'Why didn't you do that when you were on television?' ↗

— Conan O'Brien

#being funny #funny #life #nightmare #parties

At dinner parties I sit below the salt now. There are a lot of interesting people there. ↗

— Donald T. Regan

#dinner #dinner parties #i #interesting #interesting people

I grew up doing all that stuff because I was obsessed with the '50s. I had sock hops for birthday parties. So I've always done The Twist and stuff. It was pretty natural and, with my parents doing it all the time, I'd just copy them. Not very pretty. ↗

— Brittany Snow

#because #birthday #copy #doing #done

I grew up in a place where everybody was a storyteller, but nobody wrote. It was that kind of Celtic, storytelling tradition: everybody would have a story at the pub or at parties, even at the clubs and raves. ↗

— Irvine Welsh

#clubs #even #everybody #grew #i

At parties, I'll start talking and notice everyone is looking at me and feel dumb and say, 'Forget it,' and then start eating things. ↗

— Kristen Wiig

#eating #everyone #feel #forget #i

The only sound approach to collective bargaining is to work out an agreement that clarifies the rights and responsibilities of the parties, establishes principles and operates to the advantage of all concerned. ↗

— Charles E. Wilson

#agreement #approach #bargaining #clarifies #collective

America's industrial success produced a roll call of financial magnificence: Rockefellers, Morgans, Astors, Mellons, Fricks, Carnegies, Goulds, du Ponts, Belmonts, Harrimans, Huntingtons, Vanderbilts, and many more based in dynastic wealth of essentially inexhaustible proportions. John D. Rockefeller made $1 billion a year, measured in today's money, and paid no income tax. No one did, for income tax did not yet exist in America. Congress tried to introduce an income tax of 2 percent on earnings of $4,000 in 1894, but the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. Income tax wouldn't become a regular part of American Life until 1914. People would never be this rich again. Spending all this wealth became for many a more or less full-time occupation. A kind of desperate, vulgar edge became attached to almost everything they did. At one New York dinner party, guests found the table heaped with sand and at each place a little gold spade; upon a signal, they were invited to dig in and search for diamonds and other costly glitter buried within. At another party - possibly the most preposterous ever staged - several dozen horses with padded hooves were led into the ballroom of Sherry's, a vast and esteemed eating establishment, and tethered around the tables so that the guests, dressed as cowboys and cowgirls, could enjoy the novel and sublimely pointless pleasure of dining in a New York ballroom on horseback. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#money #new-york #parties #wealth #age