Florence King Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

The vitamin has been reified. A chemical intangible originally defined as a unit of nutritive value, it was long ago reified into a pill. Now it is a pill; no one except a few precise scientists define it as anything else. Once the vitamin became a pill, it became real according to the precepts of American Cartesianism: I swallow it, therefore it is. — Florence King

Even my different drummer heard a different drummer — Florence King

Misanthropes have some admirable - if paradoxical - virtues. It is no exaggeration to say that we are among the nicest people you are likely to meet. Because good manners build sturdy walls, our distaste for intimacy makes us exceedingly cordial. "ships that pass in the night." As long as you remain a stranger we will be your friend forever. — Florence King

I'd rather rot on my own floor than be found by a bunch of bingo players in a nursing home. — Florence King

One of the most startling phenomena I ever witnessed occured in the South after the Arab- israelei Six-day war. I doubt if the world has ever seen such a rapid ceasefire in anti-semetism. I heard one Southern man after another say in tones that i can only describe as gleeful: 'by dern, those Jew boys sure can fight!' One man seriously recommended that Congress pass a special act making Moshe Dayan an American citizen so that he could become Secretary of Defense. He had obviously found a new hero;'as he put it 'That one-eyed bastid would wipe out anybody offin the map whut gave us any trouble. — Florence King

Hell hath no fury like a liberal arts major scorned. — Florence King

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

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

True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories. — Florence King

Southerners are so devoted to genealogy that we see a family tree under every bush. — Florence King

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

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

Writers make everybody nervous but we terrify Silly Service workers. Our apartments always look like a front for something, and no matter how carefully we tidy up for guests we always seem to miss the note card that says, "Margaret has to die soon." We own the kind of books that spies use to construct codes, like The Letters of Mme. de Sevigne, and we are the only people in the world who write oxymoron in the margin of the Bible. Manuscripts in the fridge in case of fire, Strunk's Elements in the bathroom, the Laramie City Directory explained away with "It might come in handy," all strike fear in the GS-7 heart. Nobody really wants to sleep with a writer, but Silly Service workers won't even talk to us. — Florence King

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

Families composed of rugged individualists have to do things obliquely. — Florence King

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

No matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street — Florence King

Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in. — Florence King

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

The Apologizer Bunny keeps going and going and going. — Florence King

Episcopalians have always preferred the flying buttress to the pillar of the church. — Florence King

Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism. — Florence King

I don't suffer fools, and I like to see fools suffer. — Florence King

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

For a girl gone wrong, you can't beat the banks of the Wabash. — Florence King

Real feminism is spinsterhood. — Florence King

Recently while browsing in a secondhand bookstore I bought a paperback copy of The Intellectual and the City, but I was unable to read it. When I got home I discovered that the original owner had highlighted the entire book - literally. Every line on every page had been drawn through with a bright green Magic Marker. It was a terrifying example of a mind that had lost all power of discrimination. — Florence King

I simply like guns because you can't shoot people without them. — Florence King

There's no national glue holding us together because somebody put too much pluribus in the unum. — Florence King

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

Real feminism is spinsterhood. It's time America admitted that old maids give all women a good name. — Florence King

Agoraphobia was my quirky armor against a gregarious America ... — Florence King

There is more sexism in a year's worth of movies than actually exists in a woman's entire lifetime. — Florence King

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

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

The more immoral we become in big ways, the more puritanical we become in little ways. — Florence King

Insecurity breeds treachery: if you are kind to people who hate themselves, they will hate you as well. — Florence King

In the South, Sunday morning sex is accompanied by church bells. — Florence King

The really unfailing sign of a belle is that she exhausts people. In the old days, a girl could faint, which meant that some man had to pick her up and carry her while two or three others ran hither and yon fetching smelling salrs, water, or a litter on which to cart her away. This simply doesn't happen any more. Passing out from too much straight bourbon is just not as bellelike as fainting from unknown causes, nor is it as fastidious. — Florence King

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

If any of us had heard the word "feminist" we would have thought it meant a girl who wore too much makeup, but we were, without knowing it, feminists ourselves, bound together by the freemasonry that exists among intelligent women who know they are intelligent. It is the only kind of female bonding that works, which is why most men do not like intelligent women. They don't mind one female brain if they can enjoy it privately; it's the idea of two or more on the loose that upsets them. The girls in the college-bound group might not have been friends in every case
Sharon Cohen and I gave each other willies
but our instincts told us that we had the same enemies. — Florence King

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

Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind. — Florence King

Owning your own home is America's unique recipe for avoiding revolution and promoting pseudo-equality at the same time. To keep citizens puttering in their yards instead of sputtering on the barricades, the government has gladly deprived itself of billions in tax revenues by letting home owners deduct mortgage interest payments. — Florence King

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

In Mississippi the important thing is hooch, not bar equipment. — Florence King

He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she. Real feminism is spinsterhood. — Florence King

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

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

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

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

It takes only one child to raze a village. — Florence King

Each time a mediocre singer performs, he is saying, in effect, "This is good enough for you." The audience, thrust into that familiar American mood of knowing something is wrong but not knowing what it is, unconsciously absorbs the insult and projects it back onto the mediocre performer in the form of inattention, rudeness and noise. — Florence King

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

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

Build a fence around the South and you'd have one big madhouse. — Florence King

A cardinal rule of writing is never interrupt yourself to explain something. If you must bring up an obscure topic, drop informative hints about it as you go along so that you don't end up with the entire explanation all in one place. This keeps you from skidding to a stop and sounding teacherish. Otherwise it's better to omit the obscure topic altogether, or as mothers might put it: if you can't say it interestingly, don't say it at all. — Florence King

America is not a democracy, it's an absolute monarchy ruled by King Kid. In a nation of immigrants, the child is automatically more of an American than his parents. Americans regard children as what Mr. Hudson in Upstairs, Downstairs called betters. Aping their betters, American adults do their best to turn themselves into children. Puerility exercises droit de seigneur everywhere. — Florence King

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

I do believe in reincarnation, but I do not believe there is life before noon. — Florence King

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

A home without a grandmother is like an egg without salt. — Florence King

Spinsterhood is Nature's Own Feminism. — Florence King

The Southern man has a certain swagger about him that every woman craves in a man, whether she is willing to admit it or not. in this depressingly utilitarian age, when young lovers remove identical faded jeans and pea jackets before getting into bed together, the thought of a beau sabreur lover is not unappealing, Neither the overbearing male chauvinist nor the supportive gelding are capalbe of stirring the female blood, but a dashing cavalier is. — Florence King

Very" is the most useless word in the English language and can always come out. More than useless, it is treacherous because it invariably weakens what it is intended to strengthen. For example, would you rather hear the mincing shallowness of "I love you very much" or the heart-slamming intensity of "I love you"? — Florence King

Golf is an exercise in Scottish pointlessness for people who are no longer able to throw telephone poles at each other. — Florence King

Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors. — Florence King

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

If whisky or salt won't cure it, then to hell with it. I worry about important things. — Florence King

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

How can she grow up to be a lady if she's always got her nose in a book? — Florence King

Thank God I'm over the hill. The only heat I have left comes from hot flashes, my promiscuity is confined to the words "one size fits all," and I buy my white cotton unmentionables at Boadicea's Retreat, not Victoria's Secret. None of the things men do to women could possibly happen to me now unless the U.S. is invaded by one of those new Russian republics whose soldiers aren't fussy. — Florence King

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

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

Nothing is more frustrating than sitting in an office amid typewriters and mimeographers when you know what deus ex machina means. — Florence King

We worship education but hate learning. We worship success but hate the successful. We worship fame but hate the famous. — Florence King

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

A woman must wait for her ovaries to die before she can get her rightful personality back. Post-menstrual is the same as pre-menstrual; I am once again what I was before the age of twelve: a female human being who knows that a month has thirty day, not twenty-five, and who can spend every one of them free of the shackles of that defect of body and mind known as femininity. — Florence King

In its purest sense, nicknaming is an elitist ritual practiced by those who cherish hierarchy. For preppies it's a smoke signal that allows Bunny to tell Pooky that they belong to the same tribe, while among the good old boys it serves the cause of masculine dominance by identifying Bear and Wrecker as Alpha males. — Florence King

To a Southerner it is faux pas, not sins, that matter in this world. — Florence King

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

Why do I hate people? Who else is there to hate? — Florence King

When you go apartment-hunting in the South, you encounter little old ladies who ask you if you use strong drink. In New York you encounter paranoids who wonder if you will commit suicide
not that they care; what they worry about is blood on their fresh paint, a dubious smell in the hallway, or a hole in the awning as you pass through on your way to the sidewalk. The Southerner who moves to any part of the country has problems, but the culture shock that attacks the Southerner who moves North is almost indescribable. — Florence King

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

The copyeditor I drew was a brachycephalic, web-footed cretin who should have been in an institution learning how to make brooms. — Florence King

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

Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it. — Florence King

By sending the contradictory message that the famous are just plain folks on Mount Olympus, America has forged a relentless tension between loftiness and accessibility. Stir in the fact that the inborn talent and intelligence needed to achieve fame are immune to distributive tinkering by government programs and you have a definition of fame certain to produce envious rage: somebody screwed democracy. — Florence King

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

Animal rights activists gives disillusioned feminists an excuse to go back to being women protecting wee creatures without compromising their radical credentials — Florence King

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

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

Never look on the bright side. The glare is blinding. — Florence King

Hereditary monarchy offers numerous advantages for America. It is the only form of government able to unify a heterogeneous people. Thanks to centuries of dynastic marriage, the family tree of every royal house is an ethnic grab bag with something for everybody. We need this badly; America is the only country in the world where you can suffer culture shock without leaving home. We can't go on much longer depending upon disasters like Pearl Harbor and the Iranian hostage-taking to bring us together. — Florence King

[John Edwards] is the man that Rielle Hunter called 'real and authentic,' which tells us all we need to know about her mental abilities. This is why she can't figure out why he picked her. He could have had a multitude of sweet young things but he chose a 42-year-old who is one bleach job away from turning into one big split end, because his tumescent ego demands that he be the pretty one. — Florence King

Familiarity doesn't breed contempt, it is contempt. — Florence King