Quotes from Florence King

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.

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.

Spinsterhood is Nature's Own Feminism.

I don't suffer fools, and I like to see fools suffer.

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

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.

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.

I've done pretty well as a professional fed-up. The tools of my trade so far have been irony, tongue-in-cheek mockery, and supercilious contempt, but these are highly civilized weapons designed for 18th-century French salons.

In baseball, you can't tell the players without a scorecard, but in political commentary, you need a metaphor.

We worship education but hate learning. We worship success but hate the successful. We worship fame but hate the famous.

Optimists don't mind if you eavesdrop on them. They welcome it, in fact, because it helps them spread their fiendish gospel.

Women's writing was coming along fine until feminists came along and turned it into Women's Lit.

I do believe in reincarnation, but I do not believe there is life before noon.

Misanthropes have some admirable - if paradoxical - virtues. It is no exaggeration to say that we are among the nicest people you are likely to meet. Because good manners build sturdy walls, our distaste for intimacy makes us exceedingly cordial. "ships that pass in the night." As long as you remain a stranger we will be your friend forever.

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

A woman must wait for her ovaries to die before she can get her rightful personality back. Post-menstrual is the same as pre-menstrual; I am once again what I was before the age of twelve: a female human being who knows that a month has thirty day, not twenty-five, and who can spend every one of them free of the shackles of that defect of body and mind known as femininity.

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.

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.

Southerners have a genius for psychological alchemy...If something intolerable simply cannot be changed, driven away or shot they will not only tolerate it but take pride in it as well.

Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap.

In the South, Sunday morning sex is accompanied by church bells.

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.

Hell hath no fury like a liberal arts major scorned.

There's something unrefined about a reading woman, they always reek of the lamp. How can she grow up to be a lady if she's always got her nose in a book? Granny Rudin