Top 22 Florence King Quotes

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

I believe in a Republic of Merit in which water is allowed to find its own level, where voters, like drivers, are tested before being turned loose.

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.

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

Some last words seem flat-out unbelievable.

In ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,’ I couldn’t take my eyes off Judith Anderson as Big Mama.

Democracy elevates by turning ordinary people into extraordinary ordinary people called celebrities.

Christopher Hitchens and I were not friends or even acquaintances. We never met or spoke on the phone, just exchanged occasional brief letters – notes, really – hand-written and snail-mailed at first, e-mailed later.

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.

You can’t pretend to be witty because wit is dry, subtle, lacerating, cynical, elitist, and risque – all impossible to fake. Humor, on the other hand, is broad, soothing, positive, inclusive, and smutty – to make sure everybody gets it. Pretending to be humorous is easy, and a great many people are doing it.

True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.

Until feminists started wailing about the female’s passivity, submissiveness, and something called ‘victim status,’ I had no idea women were such doormats. My childhood was populated by Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, Pearl Buck, Marie Curie, Clare Boothe Luce, and the Duchess of Windsor.

If the West Point class of 1915 is called ‘the class the stars fell on’ for the number of World War II generals it produced, my junior-high class of 1950 is the class a ton of bricks fell on from Hollywood’s gut-wrenching portrayals of mother-love in ’40s-era movies.

If last words are to be audible and coherent, they need to be delivered before you have any tubes up your nose or down your throat. Otherwise, the nurse gets the last word when she says, ‘Don’t try to talk, honey.’

The long march of Western civilization from pantheons of gods for every taste to one God for all has been thrown into reverse by celebrity worship to give us a plethora of ancient deities to follow.

Feminists, I hasten to add, are not all bad. In fact, they are an ideal bellwether, an invaluable aid in helping me form opinions on issues that I don’t have time to keep up with. If the feminists are for it, I’m against it; if the feminists are against it, I’m for it.

Whenever people are confronted by a prediction for the future that they simply cannot or will not believe, they always say, ‘It will never happen in my lifetime.’ If the prediction is something they deplore and fear, they say it with calculated bravado, often adding a smug, snorty hhrrummph.

Any woman who has ever worked in a gutsy male environment knows that the correct response to a randy remark is an even more salacious retort. But timid feminists don’t see it that way. To them, the proper reply is a lawsuit – that safe, modern version of the old slap in the face.

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

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.

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.

Aging does not make women powerless objects of pity but colorful and entertaining individuals and, on occasion, fire-breathing dragons that wise people don’t cross.