The Day Lady Died Society and Class Quotes

You have to be a certain kind of person to casually drop a line about Bastille Day, a key date in the French revolution. Most Americans probably have never even heard of Bastille Day. The fact that the speaker's sense of time revolves around the French calendar tells us something very specific about him – he seems to be an "intellectual."

East Hampton is an extremely wealthy enclave on Long Island. The speaker isn't rich enough to have a house in East Hampton, but he's cool enough to get invited to stay there.

The speaker adopts a tired, jaded tone toward the 1950s fad of Western literary journals claiming to "discover" African literature.