Top 97 Florence King Quotes
#1. The joker in the deck of lesbian fidelity is female vanity: no woman of fifty is going to undress in front of a woman of twenty no matter how much she might lust for her.
Florence King
#2. People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.
Florence King
#3. Never look on the bright side. The glare is blinding.
Florence King
#4. Agoraphobia was my quirky armor against a gregarious America ...
Florence King
#5. In the last few years, race relations in America have entered upon a period of intensified craziness wherein fear of being called a racist has so thoroughly overwhelmed fear of being a racist that we are in danger of losing sight of the distinction.
Florence King
#6. Self-help books are making life downright unsafe. Women desperate to catch a man practice all the ploys recommended by these authors. Bump into him, trip over him, knock him down, spill something on him, scald him, but meet him.
Florence King
#7. I don't mind being regarded as perverted and unnatural, but I would die if people thought I was a Democrat.
Florence King
#8. Now the only thing I miss about sex is the cigarette afterward. Next to the first one in the morning, it's the best one of all. It tasted so good that even if I had been frigid I would have pretended otherwise just to be able to smoke it.
Florence King
#10. There's no national glue holding us together because somebody put too much pluribus in the unum.
Florence King
#11. True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.
Florence King
#12. There's something unrefined about a reading woman, they always reek of the lamp. How can she grow up to be a lady if she's always got her nose
in a book?
Granny Rudin
Florence King
#13. Southerners have a genius for psychological alchemy ... If something intolerable simply cannot be changed, driven away or shot they will not only tolerate it but take pride in it as well.
Florence King
#14. He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she. Real feminism is spinsterhood.
Florence King
#15. Randian heroes come off as metaphors for Jews because they are beset by irrational forces that try to bar them from the professions and use their virtues against them to bring about their destruction.
Florence King
#16. I do believe in reincarnation, but I do not believe there is life before noon.
Florence King
#17. Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.
Florence King
#18. In Mississippi the important thing is hooch, not bar equipment.
Florence King
#19. I cherish the review-as-literature; as lapidary journalism in the eighteenth-century mode, the last hard sparkling diamond in theessayists's tarnished crown. To me, writing a good review is not just a way to make extra money, but a sacred duty.
Florence King
#20. I've been diagnosed as being bi-polar but so have Florence Nightingale and King David ... which kinda leaves me in pretty dam good company ... if I must say so.
Timothy Pina
#21. Nothing is more frustrating than sitting in an office amid typewriters and mimeographers when you know what deus ex machina means.
Florence King
#23. Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.
Florence King
#24. Feminists will not be satisfied until every abortion is performed by a gay black doctor under an endangered tree on a reservation for handicapped Indians.
Florence King
#25. American couples have gone to such lengths to avoid the interference of in-laws that they have to pay marriage counselors to interfere between them.
Florence King
#26. In the South, Sunday morning sex is accompanied by church bells.
Florence King
#27. For a girl gone wrong, you can't beat the banks of the Wabash.
Florence King
#28. Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.
Florence King
#29. I don't suffer fools, and I like to see fools suffer.
Florence King
#30. Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it's the opposite of football; instead of building character, it tears it down.
Florence King
#31. If we define a misanthrope as 'someone who does not suffer fools and likes to see fools suffer,' we have described a person with something to look forward to.
Florence King
#32. My object is to live in a place that does not call itself 'the community with a heart.' I want one of those godforsaken towns where all the young people leave and the rest sit on the porch with a rifle across their knees.
Florence King
#33. There is much to be said for post-menopausal celibacy. Sex is rough on loners because you have to have somebody else around, but now I don't. No more diets to stay slim and desirable: I've had sex and I've had food, and I'd rather eat.
Florence King
#35. Build a fence around the South and you'd have one big madhouse.
Florence King
#36. The nice thing about Southerners is the way we enjoy our neuroses.
Florence King
#37. Familiarity doesn't breed contempt, it is contempt.
Florence King
#38. I'd rather rot on my own floor than be found by a bunch of bingo players in a nursing home.
Florence King
#39. Resistance to team play seemed to pour like wet cement through my bones, displacing supple marrow, until I was ballasted with my own contempt.
Florence King
#40. Oppressed people are treacherous for the simple reason that treachery is both a means of survival and a way to curry favor with one's oppressor.
Florence King
#41. I simply like guns because you can't shoot people without them.
Florence King
#42. Insecurity breeds treachery: if you are kind to people who hate themselves, they will hate you as well.
Florence King
#43. God may have loved the common people, but a trip to any shopping mall suggests that He made far too many of them.
Florence King
#44. Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors.
Florence King
#45. A home without a grandmother is like an egg without salt.
Florence King
#46. Americans are so emotionally fragile that soon we will have to be carried around in plastic bubbles and fed with an eye-dropper.
Florence King
#47. We worship education but hate learning. We worship success but hate the successful. We worship fame but hate the famous.
Florence King
#48. Children have no business expressing opinions on anything except Do you have enough room in the toes?
Florence King
#49. I'm for prayer in the schools because ritual and ceremony are calming and civilizing, and the little fartlings should be tamped down whenever possible.
Florence King
#50. Keep dating and you will become so sick, so badly crippled, so deformed, so emotionally warped and mentally defective that you will marry anybody.
Florence King
#51. His Grace called Virginius in and said: "Do you think a priest of the Anglican Communion should be a divorced man with two wives living?" That's the way he talks. And do you know what Virginius said? He said: "Your Grace, if it weren't for divorce, there wouldn't be an Anglican Communion.
Florence King
#52. Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind.
Florence King
#53. Men are not very good at loving, but they are experts at admiring and respecting; the woman who goes after their admiration and respect will often come out better than she who goes out after their love.
Florence King
#54. Kings and queens might do wicked things, but they don't nag. One thing I like about Bloody Mary: she never said a word about lung cancer.
Florence King
#55. Hell hath no fury like a liberal arts major scorned.
Florence King
#56. The copyeditor I drew was a brachycephalic, web-footed cretin who should have been in an institution learning how to make brooms.
Florence King
#57. The Black Death was a faithful visitor to Florence. It arrived, on average, once every ten years, always in the summer.
Ross King
#58. To me, elitism means a love of excellence and superiority, but America has declared war on both and developed a sick love of the lowest common denominator to make sure no-one becomes too fine for our touted democracy. We are almost at the point of regarding every virtue as elitist.
Florence King
#59. Let's bring back grandmothers! A real family consists of three generations. It's time Americans stopped worrying about interference and being a burden on the children and regrouped under one roof.
Florence King
#60. The Apologizer Bunny keeps going and going and going.
Florence King
#61. Of all the old maid's blessing, the greatest is carte blanche. Spinsterhood is powerful; once a woman is called "that crazy old maid" she can get away with anything.
Florence King
#62. When women talk about "privacy" they mean abortion rights, and the millions of words feminists have written about "a room of one'sown" refer to psychological space, rarely to physical solitude. For most women being alone is tantamount to being deserted.
Florence King
#63. Why do I hate people? Who else is there to hate?
Florence King
#64. If you ever meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope.
Florence King
#65. Real feminism is spinsterhood. It's time America admitted that old maids give all women a good name.
Florence King
#66. The more immoral we become in big ways, the more puritanical we become in little ways.
Florence King
#67. The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.
Florence King
#69. I have a professional acquaintance whose recent eyelid job has left her with a permanent expression of such poleaxed astonishment that she looks at all times as if she had just read one of my books.
Florence King
#70. There is more sexism in a year's worth of movies than actually exists in a woman's entire lifetime.
Florence King
#71. In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.
Florence King
#72. To make sure I learned the etiquette of grieving, Granny took me with her to the many funerals she attended. O Death, where is thy sting? Search me. I grew up looking at so many corpses that I still feel a faint touch of surprise whenever I see people move.
Florence King
#73. It's the Government's job to print the money, deliver the mail and declare war. Now give me my cigarettes.
Florence King
#74. Southerners are so devoted to genealogy that we see a family tree under every bush.
Florence King
#75. To a Southerner it is faux pas, not sins, that matter in this world.
Florence King
#76. Even my different drummer heard a different drummer
Florence King
#77. Golf is an exercise in Scottish pointlessness for people who are no longer able to throw telephone poles at each other.
Florence King
#78. For men who want to flee Family Man America and never come back, there is a guaranteed solution: homosexuality is the new French Foreign Legion.
Florence King
#79. On August 19, 1418, a competition was announced in Florence, where the city's magnificent new cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, had been under construction for more than a century
Ross King
#80. Because the theater lost a Barrymore every time a Southerner decided not to go on the stage, just about anything that comes out of a Southern mouth is bound to be a ringing line.
Florence King
#81. I've always said that next to Imperial China, the South is the best place in the world to be an old lady.
Florence King
#82. How can she grow up to be a lady if she's always got her nose in a book?
Florence King
#83. Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap.
Florence King
#84. If whisky or salt won't cure it, then to hell with it. I worry about important things.
Florence King
#86. I wasn't used to children and they were getting on my nerves. Worse, it appeared that I was a child, too. I hadn't known that before; I thought I was just short.
Florence King
#87. During the feminist seventies men were caught between a rock and a hard-on; in the fathering eighties they are caught between good hugs and bad hugs.
Florence King
#88. There is nothing wrong with "women's studies" that studying the right women can't cure, but feminist literary scholars have a penchant for dragging the rivers of deserved obscurity for third-rate neurotics.
Florence King
#89. Episcopalians have always preferred the flying buttress to the pillar of the church.
Florence King
#90. Animal rights activists gives disillusioned feminists an excuse to go back to being women protecting wee creatures without compromising their radical credentials
Florence King
#91. The belle is a product of the Deep South, which is a product of the nineteenth century and the Age of Romanticism. Virginia is a product of the eighteenth century. It's impossible to extract a belle from the Age of Reason.
Florence King
#92. In other countries, congenital introverts simply remain introverts all their lives, neither advancing nor retreating, but America's commitment to extroversion as a national art form can abrade some naturally aloof personalities until they flower into deadly nightshade.
Florence King
#93. To achieve the very pinnacle of good taste, the neoclassicists wrote their plays entirely in alexandrine verse, a rarefied meter that is uniquely tailored to the French language and fits no other.
Florence King
#94. Nothing is more likely to start me screaming like a madwoman than New York in February with its piles of blackened snow full of yellow holes drilled by dogs.
Florence King
#95. No matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street
Florence King
#96. Families composed of rugged individualists have to do things obliquely.
Florence King
#97. Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.
Florence King
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