Quote

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

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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
Love
Rather
Strengthen
Language
Intended
Come
Intensity
Mincing
Writing
Useless
Slamming
Heart
English
Shallowness
Much
Example
Weakens
Always
Hear
Treacherous
Would
Word
Invariably

More quotes by Florence King

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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.
Florence King
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It takes only one child to raze a village.
Florence King
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For men who want to flee Family Man America and never come back, there is a guaranteed solution: homosexuality is the new French Foreign Legion.
Florence King
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Why do I hate people? Who else is there to hate?
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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Never look on the bright side. The glare is blinding.
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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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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Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.
Florence King
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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.
Florence King
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When women talk about privacy they mean abortion rights, and the millions of words feminists have written about a room of one'sown refer to psychological space, rarely to physical solitude. For most women being alone is tantamount to being deserted.
Florence King
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He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she. Real feminism is spinsterhood.
Florence King
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America is the only country in the world where you can suffer culture shock without leaving home.
Florence King
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Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind.
Florence King
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A home without a grandmother is like an egg without salt.
Florence King
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Insecurity breeds treachery: if you are kind to people who hate themselves, they will hate you as well.
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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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.
Florence King
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Spinsterhood is Nature's Own Feminism.
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