Debut Party Quotes

After the night ended, she spun to me and yanked off her diadem. “There. I had my debut. I still hate parties.

Ferdinand had described what I thought to be a heartwarming love story as perverted, so I could see myself unknowingly debuting a bawdy tavern song during what was supposed to be a refined tea party.

Would you be willing to tell me how the ladies came to be here? I mean, who are they?” Ian drew a long, impatient breath, tipped his head back, and absently massaged the muscles at the back of his neck. “I met Elizabeth a year and a half ago at a party. She’d just made her debut, was already betrothed to some unfortunate nobleman, and was eager to test her wiles on me.” “Test her wiles on you? I thought you said she was engaged to another.” Sighing irritably at his friend’s naiveté, Ian said curtly, “Debutantes are a different breed from any women you’ve known. Twice a year their mamas bring them to London to make their debut. They’re paraded about during the Season like horses at an auction, then their parents sell them as wives to whoever bids the highest. The winning bidder is selected by the expedient measure of choosing whoever has the most important title and the most money.” “Barbaric!” said Jake indignantly. Ian shot him an ironic look. “Don’t waste your pity. It suits them perfectly. All they want from marriage is jewels, gowns, and the freedom to have discreet liaisons with whomever they please, once they produce the requisite heir. They’ve no notion of fidelity or honest human feeling.” Jake’s brows lifted at that.

What I want most is exactly what I don’t have. I was the one who gave you the clothes and accessories and advice. But suddenly, it was you being invited to exclusive parties like Daisy’s and getting featured by the magazines I’ve always wanted to be in. And Tim was my best friend, one of the only people who stuck by me. But once you two got together, he barely had any time for me.

To wear something skintight and pure white to a food party—how could a woman be so unabashedly confident?

The Colored Farmers’ Alliance was the name of the group that organized black farmers alongside the whites-only southern Farmers’ Alliance. Leaders from the Colored Alliance were essential in launching the People’s Party; in some respects they were well ahead of their white brethren in calling for a third party.30 But Black Populism, as it is now called, was ultimately a fruitless effort. Everywhere in the South, the Pops hit the wall of violence and vote fraud that blocked the progress of anyone who challenged white solidarity. When the new party made its debut in southern elections in 1892, black voters were attacked and a number of them were murdered, a direct reflection, according to a recent study of Black Populism, of “the political threat posed to the Democratic Party by the coalition of black and independent white voters.

Months before his Davos debut, Xi had struck a different tone in a speech to Chinese tech titans and Communist Party leaders in Beijing for a conference on “cyber security and informatization.” To an audience that included Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, Alibaba CEO Jack Ma, high-profile People’s Liberation Army (PLA) researchers, and most of China’s political elite, Xi exhorted China to focus on “gaining breakthroughs in core technology as quickly as possible.” Above all, “core technology” meant semiconductors. Xi didn’t call for a trade war, but his vision didn’t sound like trade peace, either. “We must promote strong alliances and attack strategic passes in a coordinated manner. We must assault the fortifications of core technology research and development…. We must not only call forth the assault, we must also sound the call for assembly, which means that we must concentrate the most powerful forces to act together, compose shock brigades and special forces to storm the passes.” Donald Trump, it turned out, wasn’t the only world leader who mixed martial metaphors with economic policy. The chip industry faced an organized assault by the world’s second-largest economy and the one-party state that ruled it.

Jack Reacher made his first appearance in print on March 17, 1997—St. Patrick’s Day—when Putnam published Killing Floor in the United States, which was Reacher’s—and my—debut. But I can trace his, and the book’s, genesis backward at least to New Year’s Eve 1988. Back then I worked for a commercial television station in Manchester, England. I was eleven years into a career as a presentation director, which was a little like an air traffic controller for the network airwaves. In February 1988, the UK commercial network had started twenty-four-hour broadcasting. For a year before that, management had been talking about how to man the new expanded commitment. None of us really wanted to work nights. Management didn’t really want to hire extra people. End of story. Stalemate. Impasse. What broke it was the offer of a huge raise. We took it, and by New Year’s Eve we were ten fat and happy months into the new contract. I went to a party, but didn’t feel much like celebrating. Not that I wasn’t content in the short term—I sleep better by day than night, and I like being up and about when the world is quiet and lonely, and for sure I was having a ball with the new salary. But I knew in my bones that management resented the raise, and I knew that the new contract was in fact the beginning of the end. Sooner or later, we would all be fired in revenge. I felt it was only a matter of time. Nobody agreed with me, except one woman. At the party, in a quiet moment, she asked me, “What are you going to do when this is all over?