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

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
Learning
Education
Successful
Success
Hate
Famous
Worship
Fame

More quotes by Florence King

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If you ever meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope.
Florence King
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Why do I hate people? Who else is there to hate?
Florence King
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To me, elitism means a love of excellence and superiority, but America has declared war on both and developed a sick love of the lowest common denominator to make sure no-one becomes too fine for our touted democracy. We are almost at the point of regarding every virtue as elitist.
Florence King
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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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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.
Florence King
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A home without a grandmother is like an egg without salt.
Florence King
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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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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.
Florence King
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Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.
Florence King
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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.
Florence King
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Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it's the opposite of football instead of building character, it tears it down.
Florence King
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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.
Florence King
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The copyeditor I drew was a brachycephalic, web-footed cretin who should have been in an institution learning how to make brooms.
Florence King
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There's no national glue holding us together because somebody put too much pluribus in the unum.
Florence King
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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.
Florence King
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I have a professional acquaintance whose recent eyelid job has left her with a permanent expression of such poleaxed astonishment that she looks at all times as if she had just read one of my books.
Florence King
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If whisky or salt won't cure it, then to hell with it. I worry about important things.
Florence King
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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.
Florence King
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My object is to live in a place that does not call itself 'the community with a heart.' I want one of those godforsaken towns where all the young people leave and the rest sit on the porch with a rifle across their knees.
Florence King
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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?
Florence King