Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady Quotes

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

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

“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

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

“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

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

“There is no such thing as a fallen woman; when she steps out of her place, she always steps up.”
― Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady

“I was miserable. I wasn't used to children and they were getting on my nerves. Worse, it appeared that I was a child too. I hadn't known that before. I thought I was just short.”
― Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady

“I saw how dating chipped away tiny pieces of a woman’s self-confidence; piece by piece, date by date, she was diminished by some form of unnatural behavior forced on her by social usage.”
― Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady

“For all I had heard about ancestors, I had no wish to be one. The idea of having children so they could have children so they could have children frightened me. It seemed so pointless, like that blissful measure of time in Heaven that so comforted the devout: ‘If a bird transferred every grain of sand on every beach, grain by grain, and dropped them in the ocean, that is the beginning of eternity.”
― Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady

“Ever since high school I had been one of the special girls because of my grades; A’s were the source of my power, but A’s came from school and school would soon end. When it did, I would go from ‘God, she’s a brain,’ to ‘Hey, she’s a secretary,’ except I did not know shorthand.”
― Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady

“How is it?”
Not like Father used to make. ‘Perfect.’
Soon, very soon, my lie became the truth. Martinis are like that, especially when shared with someone whose name you have whispered to yourself just for the magic of its sound.”
― Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady