Life's Pleasures Quote by Florence King

King weaponizes nostalgia the way other writers use romance: as a setup for a punchline that lands somewhere between confession and indictment. The line starts as a raunchy epigram about postcoital cigarettes, then swerves into a brutal recalibration of what was actually being desired. Sex, in this telling, isn’t remembered as intimacy or pleasure but as a kind of transaction that culminates in a reward: a smoke, a small, controllable hit of satisfaction. The joke is that the cigarette becomes the real climax. The darker point is that the arrangement is plausible.

Her phrasing is doing double work. “The only thing I miss” is a hard pivot away from the culturally mandated script that sex is the pinnacle experience; King refuses the sentimental myth and replaces it with appetite, ritual, and irony. The comparison to “the first one in the morning” is classic addict’s hierarchy, a knowingly taboo metric for ranking pleasures. It’s funny because it’s precise, and it’s cutting because it’s recognizably true to anyone who’s watched desire get outsourced to habit.

Then she drops the blade: “even if I had been frigid I would have pretended otherwise.” King exposes the performance baked into heterosexual expectations of her era, where women were often coached to manage male ego, smooth over awkwardness, and translate their own ambivalence into reassuring theater. The cigarette becomes a symbol of postwar adult sophistication, but also of escape: a sanctioned pause, a tiny private room inside a situation that may not have felt private at all.