Florence King Quotes

69 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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
Any hope that America would finally grow up vanished with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity. Fundamentalism, with its born-again regression, its pink-and-gold concept of heaven, its literal-mindedness, its rambunctious good cheer... its anti-intellectualism... its puerile hymns... and its faith-healing... are made to order for King Kid America.

Florence King
America is the only country in the world where you can suffer culture shock without leaving home.

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
In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.

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
I believe in a Republic of Merit in which water is allowed to find its own level, where voters, like drivers, are tested before being turned loose.

Florence King
He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she.

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

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

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

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

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
For men who want to flee the Family Man America and never come back, there is a guaranteed solution: homosexuality is the new French Foreign Legion.

Florence King
I don't mind being regarded as perverted and unnatural, but I would die if people thought I was a Democrat.

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

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

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

Florence King
In order to molest a child you must first be in the same room with a child, and I don't know how perverts stand it.

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

Florence King