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

— Florence King

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Beauty

More quotes by Florence King

Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.

The Florence King Reader (1995)

Chinks in America's EGALITARIAN armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

The joker in the deck of lesbian fidelity is female vanity: no woman of fifty is going to undress in front of a woman of twenty no matter how much she might lust for her.

The Florence King Reader (1995)

During the feminist seventies men were caught between a rock and a hard-on; in the fathering eighties they are caught between good hugs and bad hugs.

True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories...but American-style nostalgia is about as ephemeral as copyrighted déjà vu.

All Florence King quotes →

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Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.

Democritus Freeman (1948)

True beauty dwells in deep retreats,
Whose veil is unremoved
Till heart with heart in concord beats,
And the lover is beloved.

William Wordsworth

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.

William Shakespeare The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Florence King (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.