QotD: Euphemism edition...

I would have happily emptied Miss King's ashtrays for years to have penned this. You'll be half a sentence past it before you realize the knife's gone in, and then you have to back up a phrase and just look at it, admiringly....

"Giving one’s memoirs a title that has to be explained must be a status symbol among the leftist literati. First there was Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento; now comes Gore Vidal’s Palimpsest. Miss Hellman’s title at least sounded pretty, but Maître Vidal’s sounds like an arcane sexual practice involving an inflated condom that explodes like the Hindenburg in the tradesmen’s entrance of some hired Apollo, sending ecstasy and other things washing over Maître Vidal." -Florence King