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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.

Florence King

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Florence King
Age: 80 †
Born: 1936
Born: January 5
Died: 2016
Died: January 6
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Washington
District of Columbia
Florence Virginia King
Life
Figures
Prisoners
Choose
Destroys
Taking
Prisoner
American
Wit
Woman
Tragic
Women
Witty
Must
Lovers
Love
Figure
Eroticism

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There's no national glue holding us together because somebody put too much pluribus in the unum.
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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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Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind.
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The proliferation of support groups suggests to me that too many Americans are growing up in homes that do not contain a grandmoth.
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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.
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Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.
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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.
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Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.
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I don't mind being regarded as perverted and unnatural, but I would die if people thought I was a Democrat.
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America is the only country in the world where you can suffer culture shock without leaving home.
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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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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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We worship education but hate learning. We worship success but hate the successful. We worship fame but hate the famous.
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Familiarity breeds democracry.
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We worship education but hate learning.
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Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.
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The Apologizer Bunny keeps going and going and going.
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Insecurity breeds treachery: if you are kind to people who hate themselves, they will hate you as well.
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Real feminism is spinsterhood. It's time America admitted that old maids give all women a good name.
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Families composed of rugged individualists have to do things obliquely.
Florence King