187 Quotes by Florence King

Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker’s already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.

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.

I simply like guns because you can’t shoot people without them.

Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, it is contempt.

Updike’s style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors.

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.

Oppressed people are treacherous for the simple reason that treachery is both a means of survival and a way to curry favor with one’s oppressor.

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.

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.