Florence King Quotes

69 Sourced Quotes

The proliferation of support groups suggests to me that too many Americans are growing up in homes that do not contain a grandmother.

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

Florence King
We wallow in nostalgia but manage to get it all wrong. True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories [...] but American-style nostalgia is about as ephemeral as copyrighted déjà vu.

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
Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

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
Americans respect talent only insofar as it leads to fame, and we reserve our most fervent admiration for famous people who destroy their lives as well as their talent. The fatal flaws of Elvis, Judy, and Marilyn register much higher on our national applause meter than their living achievements. In Amerca, talent is merely a tool for becoming famous in life so you can become more famous in death - where all are equal.

Florence King
I like to use as few commas as possible so that sentences will go down in one swallow without touching the sides.

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

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

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
If we had the right kind of laws in this country, I'd challenge her to a duel.

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

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

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
Humor inspires sympathetic, good-natured laughter and is favored by the healing power gang. 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
The American woman's concept of marriage is a clearly etched picture of something uninflated on the floor. A sleeping-bag withoutair, a beanbag without beans, a padded bra without pads. To work on it, you start pumping--what the magazines call "breathing life into your marriage." Do enough of this and the marriage becomes a kind of Banquo's ghost, a quasi-living entity.

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

Florence King