Florence King Quotes (35 Quotes)

Those colorful denizens of male despair, the Bowery bum and the rail-riding hobo, have been replaced by the bag lady and the welfare mother. Women have even taken over Skid Row.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Any discussion of the problems of being funny in America will not make sense unless we substitute the word wit for humor. Humor inspires sympathetic good-natured laughter and is favored by the ''healing-power'' gang. Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocu

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.

Golf is tiddlywinks played while standing up and and wearing a hat

Families composed of rugged individualists have to do things obliquely.

Animal rights activists gives disillusioned feminists an excuse to go back to being women protecting wee creatures without compromising their radical credentials

I'm for prayer in the schools because ritual and ceremony are calming and civilizing, and the little fartlings should be tamped down whenever possible.

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

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

Familiarity doesn't breed contempt, it is contempt.

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

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.

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

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 government.

We worship education but hate learning.

True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.

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.

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.

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.''

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

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 . . .

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

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.

Lacking ladylike poison, Lizzie (Borden) did what every over-civilized, understated Wasp is entirely capable of doing once we finally admit we're mad as hell and aren't going to take it any more She went from Anglo to Saxon in a trice

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

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

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

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

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