Florence King Quotes - Page 3

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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

Country, Home, Government

Florence King (1990). “Reflections In A Jaundiced Eye”, p.125, Macmillan

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

Florence King

Party, People, Political

Florence King (1991). “Lump It Or Leave It”, p.191, Macmillan

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Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind. 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 d?j? vu.

Florence King

Memories, Style, Mind

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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

People, Achievement, Becoming

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

Florence King

Inspirational, Suffering, Fool

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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

Dog, New York, Yellow

Florence King (1976). “Southern ladies and gentlemen”

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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

Women, Home, Unique

Florence King (1990). “Reflections In A Jaundiced Eye”, p.91, Macmillan

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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

Children, Real, Grandma

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Spinsterhood is Nature's Own Feminism.

Florence King

Feminism, Spinsterhood

Florence King (1990). “Reflections In A Jaundiced Eye”, p.49, Macmillan

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Judge not, lest ye be judged judgmental.

Florence King

Judging, Judgmental, Judged

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Families composed of rugged individualists have to do things obliquely.

Florence King

Family, Rugged

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

Florence King

Writing, Metaphor, Strain

"The Florence King Reader". Book by Florence King, 1995.

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True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.

Florence King

Memories, Literature, Ephemeral

"Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye". Book by Florence King, 1989.

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

Florence King

Order, Snakes, Literature

Florence King (1991). “Lump It Or Leave It”, p.22, Macmillan

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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

Women, White, Hot Flashes

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As the only class distinction available in a democracy, the college degree has created a caste society as rigid as ancient India's. Condemning elitism and simultaneously quaking in fear that our children won't become members of the elite, we send them to college, not to learn, but to "be" college graduates, rationalizing our snobbery with the cliché that high technology has eliminated the need for the manual labor that we secretly hold in contempt.

Florence King

Education, Children, Technology

Florence King (1991). “Lump It Or Leave It”, p.77, Macmillan

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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

Eye, Plastic, Feds

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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

Team, Play, Groups

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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

Men, America, Want

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One of life's intriguing paradoxes is that hierarchical social order makes cheap rents and outré artists' colonies possible. Raffish bohemian neighborhoods flourished in the days of racial segregation; under integration the artistic poor have no safe places in which to create.... If America lacks a vigorous culture it is partly because studios and ateliers have become crack houses.

Florence King

Artist, America, Order

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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

Equality, America, Government

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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

Southern, Goes On, Mouths

Florence King (1993). “Southern Ladies & Gentlemen”, p.162, Macmillan

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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

Animal, Humanness Is, Steel

Florence King (1991). “Lump It Or Leave It”, p.6, Macmillan

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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

Jobs, Book, Expression

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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

Writing, Crowns, Literature

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Florence King

Born: January 5, 1936
Died: January 6, 2016
Occupation: Novelist
Cite this Page: Citation

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