Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady: A Memoir

“Keep dating and you will become so sick, so badly crippled, so deformed, so emotionally warped and mentally defective that you will marry anybody.”
― Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady: A Memoir

“Misanthropes have some admirable - if paradoxical - virtues. It is no exaggeration to say that we are among the nicest people you are likely to meet. Because good manners build sturdy walls, our distaste for intimacy makes us exceedingly cordial. “ships that pass in the night.” As long as you remain a stranger we will be your friend forever.”
― Florence King

“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

“If any of us had heard the word "feminist" we would have thought it meant a girl who wore too much makeup, but we were, without knowing it, feminists ourselves, bound together by the freemasonry that exists among intelligent women who know they are intelligent. It is the only kind of female bonding that works, which is why most men do not like intelligent women. They don't mind one female brain if they can enjoy it privately; it's the idea of two or more on the loose that upsets them. The girls in the college-bound group might not have been friends in every case--Sharon Cohen and I gave each other willies--but our instincts told us that we had the same enemies.”
― Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady: A Memoir

“A woman must wait for her ovaries to die before she can get her rightful personality back. Post-menstrual is the same as pre-menstrual; I am once again what I was before the age of twelve: a female human being who knows that a month has thirty day, not twenty-five, and who can spend every one of them free of the shackles of that defect of body and mind known as femininity.”
― Florence King

“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

“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

“In the South, Sunday morning sex is accompanied by church bells.”
― Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady: A Memoir

“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

“Writers make everybody nervous but we terrify Silly Service workers. Our apartments always look like a front for something, and no matter how carefully we tidy up for guests we always seem to miss the note card that says, "Margaret has to die soon." We own the kind of books that spies use to construct codes, like The Letters of Mme. de Sevigne, and we are the only people in the world who write oxymoron in the margin of the Bible. Manuscripts in the fridge in case of fire, Strunk's Elements in the bathroom, the Laramie City Directory explained away with "It might come in handy," all strike fear in the GS-7 heart. Nobody really wants to sleep with a writer, but Silly Service workers won't even talk to us.”
― Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady: A Memoir

“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.”
― Florence King, Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye

“Hell hath no fury like a liberal arts major scorned.”
― Florence King, Lump it or Leave It

“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, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady: A Memoir

“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

“No matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street”
― Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady: A Memoir

“Build a fence around the South and you'd have one big madhouse.”
― Florence King

“How can she grow up to be a lady if she's always got her nose in a book?”
― Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady: A Memoir

“To make sure I learned the etiquette of grieving, Granny took me with her to the many funerals she attended. O Death, where is thy sting? Search me. I grew up looking at so many corpses that I still feel a faint touch of surprise whenever I see people move.”
― Florence King, Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye

“Children have no business expressing opinions on anything except "Do you have enough room in the toes?”
― Florence King, Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye

“Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.”
― Florence King

“even my different drummer heard a different drummer”
― Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady: A Memoir

“In Mississippi the important thing is hooch, not bar equipment.”
― Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady: A Memoir

“Nothing is more frustrating than sitting in an office amid typewriters and mimeographers when you know what deus ex machina means.”
― Florence King, Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye

“For a girl gone wrong, you can't beat the banks of the Wabash.”
― Florence King, The Florence King Reader

“The belle is a product of the Deep South, which is a product of the nineteenth century and the Age of Romanticism. Virginia is a product of the eighteenth century. It's impossible to extract a belle from the Age of Reason.”
― Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady: A Memoir

“The Southern girl is usually an unsalvageable narcissist by the time she gets to junior high school because she has grasped the charming fact that her body, especially its exclusively female parts, has the power to make strong men weak - and strong governments fall.

Toppling a government was an easy thing to dream about when i was a little girl because that famous Maryland lady, the Duchess of Windsor, had actually coined it a few years earlier. She had accomplished what we were all taught to do: Cause trouble.'isn't she wonderful.' we breathed, 'she just got everybody so upset! Wouldn't it be just the most fun to upset a whole country? She almost caused a war - she must have bumped Edward with her bust. oh, I'd just love to start a war, wouldn't you?”
― Florence King, Southern Ladies and Gentlemen

“The Southern man has a certain swagger about him that every woman craves in a man, whether she is willing to admit it or not. in this depressingly utilitarian age, when young lovers remove identical faded jeans and pea jackets before getting into bed together, the thought of a beau sabre lover is not unappealing, Neither the overbearing male chauvinist nor the supportive gelding are capable of stirring the female blood, but a dashing cavalier is.”
― Florence King, Southern Ladies and Gentlemen

“[John Edwards] is the man that Rielle Hunter called 'real and authentic,' which tells us all we need to know about her mental abilities. This is why she can't figure out why he picked her. He could have had a multitude of sweet young things but he chose a 42-year-old who is one bleach job away from turning into one big split end, because his tumescent ego demands that he be the pretty one.”
― Florence King

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_King