"Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors."
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Quote collection
Florence King quotes (page 5 of 6)
114 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"America is the only country in the world where you can suffer culture shock without leaving home."
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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."
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"In other countries, congenital introverts simply remain introverts all their lives, neither advancing nor retreating, but America's commitment to extroversion as a national art form can abrade some naturally aloof personalities until they flower into deadly nightshade."
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"to a Southerner it is faux pas, not sins, that matter in this world."
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"Never look on the bright side. The glare is blinding."
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"The feminization of America has made emotions sacrosanct while condemning as cold and unfeeling rigorous concepts such as duty andhonor. Propelled by incessant hosannas to woman's "finer" this and "softer" that, we make emotional decisions instead of ethical ones and then congratulate ourselves for having "heart."
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"I don't suffer fools, and I like to see fools suffer."
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"In the last few years, race relations in America have entered upon a period of intensified craziness wherein fear of being called a racist has so thoroughly overwhelmed fear of being a racist that we are in danger of losing sight of the distinction."
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"There is nothing wrong with "women's studies" that studying the right women can't cure, but feminist literary scholars have a penchant for dragging the rivers of deserved obscurity for third-rate neurotics."
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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."
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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."
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"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 jocular, and it's the opposite of football; instead of building character, it tears it down."
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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."
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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."
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"Keep dating and you will become so sick, so badly crippled, so deformed, so emotionally warped and mentally defective that you will marry anybody."
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"Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it's the opposite of football; instead of building character, it tears it down."
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"In Mississippi the important thing is hooch, not bar equipment."
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"Familiarity breeds democracry."
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"Learn to spot and avoid "writer groupies." The writer's self-sufficiency and our love for our work tend to attract insecure people who never can get enough love. They grow jealous of our work and come to regard it as a rival. These people can destroy you, so kick them out of your life or don't admit them in the first place."
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