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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.

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
Personality
Deadly
Extroversion
Simply
Naturally
Congenital
Lives
Countries
Retreating
Art
Remain
Introverts
Form
Commitment
Aloof
America
National
Introvert
Country
Neither
Advancing
Flower
Personalities

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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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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.
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Why do I hate people? Who else is there to hate?
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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.
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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.
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Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.
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I've always said that next to Imperial China, the South is the best place in the world to be an old lady.
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We worship education but hate learning.
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Very is the most useless word in the English language and can always come out. More than useless, it is treacherous because it invariably weakens what it is intended to strengthen. For example, would you rather hear the mincing shallowness of I love you very much or the heart-slamming intensity of I love you?
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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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Never look on the bright side. The glare is blinding.
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A home without a grandmother is like an egg without salt.
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Let's bring back grandmothers! A real family consists of three generations. It's time Americans stopped worrying about interference and being a burden on the children and regrouped under one roof.
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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.
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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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If whisky or salt won't cure it, then to hell with it. I worry about important things.
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No matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street
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It takes only one child to raze a village.
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to a Southerner it is faux pas, not sins, that matter in this world.
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Each time a mediocre singer performs, he is saying, in effect, This is good enough for you. The audience, thrust into that familiar American mood of knowing something is wrong but not knowing what it is, unconsciously absorbs the insult and projects it back onto the mediocre performer in the form of inattention, rudeness and noise.
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