Life's Pleasures Quote by Sally Quinn

Sally Quinn is doing something slyly Washingtonian here: taking the most mocked symbol of elite culture - the dinner party - and reframing it as something closer to liturgy. The opening, "Funny you mention", carries a defensive smile; it signals she knows the stereotype (the Georgetown hostess as status broker) and intends to disarm it by elevating the practice. Her move isn’t just rhetorical polish. It’s a claim about where meaning migrates when traditional religion recedes: toward curated intimacy, ritualized hospitality, and the choreography of belonging.

The sentence stacks sensory markers - candlelight, wine, your table - because the argument isn’t abstract. Quinn is saying the sacred is felt through atmosphere and repetition. That’s why "close friends" matters: not networking, not spectacle, but a chosen congregation. The subtext is class-coded, though. Candlelight and wine imply leisure, safety, and a home spacious enough to host. Calling it "religious experience" quietly absolves the social performance by recasting it as service, communion, even grace.

Then she sharpens the claim: "To me it's a form of sacrament". Sacrament is a loaded word, suggesting an outward act that conveys inward transformation. Quinn isn’t just romanticizing entertaining; she’s insisting that shared meals can do the social work churches used to do - bind people, mark time, enact care. In a culture where loneliness is rampant and institutions are distrusted, the dinner party becomes a private institution: imperfect, exclusionary at times, but still a deliberate ritual against drift.