Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Florence King
Age: 80 †
Born: 1936
Born: January 5
Died: 2016
Died: January 6
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Washington
District of Columbia
Florence Virginia King
Live
Objects
Sociability
Heart
Rest
Rifle
People
Leave
Porch
Call
Rifles
Community
Knees
Place
Towns
Doe
Object
Young
Across

More quotes by Florence King

Image
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
Image
Insecurity breeds treachery: if you are kind to people who hate themselves, they will hate you as well.
Florence King
Image
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
Florence King
Image
Families composed of rugged individualists have to do things obliquely.
Florence King
Image
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.
Florence King
Image
Why do I hate people? Who else is there to hate?
Florence King
Image
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
Image
Judge not, lest ye be judged judgmental.
Florence King
Image
The copyeditor I drew was a brachycephalic, web-footed cretin who should have been in an institution learning how to make brooms.
Florence King
Image
Learn to spot and avoid writer groupies. The writer's self-sufficiency and our love for our work tend to attract insecure people who never can get enough love. They grow jealous of our work and come to regard it as a rival. These people can destroy you, so kick them out of your life or don't admit them in the first place.
Florence King
Image
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
Image
A home without a grandmother is like an egg without salt.
Florence King
Image
Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.
Florence King
Image
There's no national glue holding us together because somebody put too much pluribus in the unum.
Florence King
Image
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
Image
Never look on the bright side. The glare is blinding.
Florence King
Image
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
Image
Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.
Florence King
Image
America is the only country in the world where you can suffer culture shock without leaving home.
Florence King
Image
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