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Florence King Quotes

Florence Virginia King was an American novelist, essayist and columnist.

While her early writings focused on the American South and those who live there, much of King's later work was published in National Review. Until her retirement in 2002, her column in National Review, "The Misanthrope's Corner", was known for "serving up a smorgasbord of curmudgeonly critiques about rubes and all else bothersome to the Queen of Mean", as the magazine put it. After leaving retirement in 2006, she began writing a new column for National Review entitled "The Bent Pin."

King was a traditionalist conservative, but not a "movement conservative," and she objected to much of the populist direction of the contemporary American Right. She was an active Episcopalian , a member of Phi Alpha Theta, and a monarchist. Wikipedia  

✵ 5. January 1936 – 6. January 2016
Florence King: 9 quotes0 likes

Famous Florence King Quotes

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

Florence King

Source: Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady

“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

“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

"Déjà Views", in Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye (1989), p. 112

“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

Lump It or Leave It (1990)

“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

"Does Your Child Taste Salty?", in Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye (1989)

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

Florence King

The Florence King Reader (1995)

“I wasn't used to children and they were getting on my nerves. Worse, it appeared that I was a child, too. I hadn't known that before; I thought I was just short.”

Florence King

On her first day of kindergarten, from Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady (1990)

“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

"From Captain Marvel to Captain Valium", in Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye (1989)

“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

The Florence King Reader (1995)

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