Florence King - Reflections in a jaundiced eye (1989)

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
We want a president who is as much like an American tourist as possible. Someone with the same goofy grin, the same innocent intentions, the same naive trust; a president with no conception of foreign policy and no discernible connection to the U.S. government, whose Nice Guyism will narrow the gap between the U.S. and us until nobody can tell the difference.

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

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.... Since we're all human, since anybody can make mistakes, since nobody's perfect, and since everybody is 'equal,' a human error is Democracy in Action.

Florence King
Owning your own home is America's unique recipe for avoiding revolution and promoting pseudo-equality at the same time.

Florence King
Of all the benefits of spinsterhood, the greatest is carte blanche. Once a woman is called 'that crazy old maid' she can get away with anything.

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

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

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

Florence King