Florence King Quotes - Page 4

Americans are so emotionally fragile that soon we will have to be carried around in plastic bubbles and fed with an eye-dropper.

Resistance to team play seemed to pour like wet cement through my bones, displacing supple marrow, until I was ballasted with my own contempt.

The proliferation of support groups suggests to me that too many Americans are growing up in homes that do not contain a grandmother. A home without a grandmother is like an egg without salt.... The emotionally satisfying discussions that take place in Chronic Pain Outreach and Depression Resources are simply updated versions of the grandmotherly practice of hanging crepe. We could eliminate much of the isolation that support groups exist to fill and save the "traditional family" that everybody is so worried about if more couples took their aging parents to live with them.

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.

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.

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.

Never look on the bright side. The glare is blinding.

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.

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

The copyeditor I drew was a brachycephalic, web-footed cretin who should have been in an institution learning how to make brooms.

Southerners are so devoted to genealogy that we see a family tree under every bush.

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.

The confidence and security of a people can be measured by their attitude toward laxatives. At the high noon of the British sun, soldiers in far-flung outposts of the Empire doctored themselves with "a spoonful o' gunpowder in a cuppa 'ot tea." Purveyors and users of harsh laxatives were not afraid of being thought mean and unfriendly just because their laxatives were. But in America, the need to be nice is so consuming that nobody would dare take a laxative that makes you run up the stairs two at a time, pushing others aside and yelling, "Get out of the way!

Judge not, lest ye be judged judgmental.

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.

Randian heroes come off as metaphors for Jews because they are beset by irrational forces that try to bar them from the professions and use their virtues against them to bring about their destruction.

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.

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.

Animal rights activists gives disillusioned feminists an excuse to go back to being women protecting wee creatures without compromising their radical credentials

The American woman's concept of marriage is a clearly etched picture of something uninflated on the floor. A sleeping-bag withoutair, a beanbag without beans, a padded bra without pads. To work on it, you start pumping--what the magazines call "breathing life into your marriage." Do enough of this and the marriage becomes a kind of Banquo's ghost, a quasi-living entity.

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.

The Apologizer Bunny keeps going and going and going.

In its purest sense, nicknaming is an elitist ritual practiced by those who cherish hierarchy. For preppies it's a smoke signal that allows Bunny to tell Pooky that they belong to the same tribe, while among the good old boys it serves the cause of masculine dominance by identifying Bear and Wrecker as Alpha males.

Familiarity doesn't breed contempt, it is contempt.

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