Florence King Quotes

The nice thing about Southerners is the way we enjoy our neuroses.

True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.

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

Judge not, lest ye be judged judgmental.

Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it's the opposite of football; instead of building character, it tears it down.

Keep dating and you will become so sick, so badly crippled, so deformed, so emotionally warped and mentally defective that you will marry anybody.

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

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

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.

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

The Apologizer Bunny keeps going and going and going.

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

Resistance to team play seemed to pour like wet cement through my bones, displacing supple marrow, until I was ballasted with my own contempt.

Even my different drummer heard a different drummer

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.

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.

Why do I hate people? Who else is there to hate?

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

Familiarity doesn't breed contempt, it is contempt.

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

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

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

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

Hell hath no fury like a liberal arts major scorned.

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

Americans are so emotionally fragile that soon we will have to be carried around in plastic bubbles and fed with an eye-dropper.

I've always said that next to Imperial China, the South is the best place in the world to be an old lady.

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

Never look on the bright side. The glare is blinding.

Spinsterhood is Nature's Own Feminism.

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

If you ever meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope.

Families composed of rugged individualists have to do things obliquely.

Real feminism is spinsterhood.

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

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

Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

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.

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

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.

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

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

It takes only one child to raze a village.

It's the Government's job to print the money, deliver the mail and declare war. Now give me my cigarettes.

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

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

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

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

Children have no business expressing opinions on anything except Do you have enough room in the toes?

God may have loved the common people, but a trip to any shopping mall suggests that He made far too many of them.

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

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

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