"There is more sexism in a year's worth of movies than actually exists in a woman's entire lifetime."
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Quote collection
Florence King quotes (page 4 of 6)
114 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The copyeditor I drew was a brachycephalic, web-footed cretin who should have been in an institution learning how to make brooms."
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"Southerners are so devoted to genealogy that we see a family tree under every bush."
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"A cardinal rule of writing is never interrupt yourself to explain something. If you must bring up an obscure topic, drop informative hints about it as you go along so that you don't end up with the entire explanation all in one place. This keeps you from skidding to a stop and sounding teacherish. Otherwise it's better to omit the obscure topic altogether, or as mothers might put it: if you can't say it interestingly, don't say it at all."
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"I do believe in reincarnation, but I do not believe there is life before noon."
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"Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind."
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"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."
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"Real feminism is spinsterhood."
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"I've always said that next to Imperial China, the South is the best place in the world to be an old lady."
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"When you go apartment-hunting in the South, you encounter little old ladies who ask you if you use strong drink. In New York you encounter paranoids who wonder if you will commit suicide--not that they care; what they worry about is blood on their fresh paint, a dubious smell in the hallway, or a hole in the awning as you pass through on your way to the sidewalk. The Southerner who moves to any part of the country has problems, but the culture shock that attacks the Southerner who moves North is almost indescribable."
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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."
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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."
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"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."
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"The nice thing about Southerners is the way we enjoy our neuroses."
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"It takes only one child to raze a village."
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"Spinsterhood is Nature's Own Feminism."
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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."
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"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."
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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."
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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."
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