Dorothy Parker Quotes

Pictures pass me in long review,-- Marching columns of dead events. I was tender, and, often, true; Ever a prey to coincidence. Always knew I the consequence; Always saw what the end would be. We're as Nature has made us -- hence I loved them until they loved me.

Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

Sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion.

Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it and it darts away.

I find her anecdotes more efficacious than sheep-counting, rain on a tin roof, or alanol tablets.... you will find me and Morpheus, off in a corner, necking.

Then if my friendships break and bend, There's little need to cry The while I know that every foe Is faithful till I die.

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

I won't telephone him. I'll never telephone him again as long as I live. He'll rot in hell, before I'll call him up. You don't have to give me strength, God; I have it myself. If he wanted me, he could get me. He knows where I am. He knows I'm waiting here. He's so sure of me, so sure. I wonder why they hate you, as soon as they are sure of you.

I hate writing, I love having written.

I like to have a martini/Two at the very most.

Just begin a story with such a phrase as 'I remember Disraeli - poor old Dizz! - once saying to me, in answer to my poke in the eye,' and you will find me and Morpheus off in a corner, necking.

If wild my breast and sore my pride, I bask in dreams of suicide, If cool my heart and high my head I think 'How lucky are the dead.

[After she and Clare Boothe Luce met in a doorway and the latter said, 'Age before beauty':] Pearls before swine.

All I say is, nobody has any business to go around looking like a horse and behaving as if it were all right. You don't catch horses going around looking like people, do you?

Now that you've got me right down to it, the only thing I didn't like about The Barrets of Wimplole Street was the play.

Should they whisper false of you, Never trouble to deny; Should the words they say be true, Weep and storm and say they lie.

Perhaps it suddenly brought to us the sense of change. Or irresponsibility. But don't forget that, though the people in the twenties seemed like flops, they weren't. Fitzgerald, the rest of them, reckless as they were, drinkers as they were, they worked damn hard and all the time.

It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes.

I require only three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid.

Her mind lives tidily, apart from cold and noise and pain. And bolts the door against her heart, out wailing in the rain.

Brevity is the soul of lingerie.

Everybody's got their troubles.

All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.

At birth the Devil touched my tongue.

How do people go to sleep? I'm afraid I've lost the knack. I might try busting myself smartly over the temple with the night-light. I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things.

Bewildered is the fox who lives to find that grapes beyond reach can be really sour.

She can sit up and beg, and she can give her paw — I don't say she will, but she can.

Hollywood is one place in the world where you can die of encouragement.

The writer's way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say, cleaning out ferryboats?

We were all imitative. We all wandered in after Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay. We were all being dashing and gallant, declaring we weren't virgins, whether we were or not.

On being told of the death of former President Calvin Coolidge: How could they tell?

[To the British actor who annoyed her by repeated references to his busy 'shedule':] I think you're full of skit.

My verses, I cannot say poems. . . . I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.

People are more fun than anyone.

I can’t write five words but that I change seven.

I shudder at the thought of men.... I'm due to fall in love again

Work is the province of cattle.

[On Lou Tellegen's Women Have Been Kind:] The book ... has all the elegance of a quirked little finger and all the glitter of a pair of new rubbers.

People ought to be one of two things, young or dead.

It is that word 'hunny,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

Age before beauty, and pearls before swine.

In the pathway of the sun, In the footsteps of the breeze, Where the world and sky are one, He shall ride the silver seas, He shall cut the glittering wave. I shall sit at home, and rock; Rise, to heed a neighbor's knock; Brew my tea, and snip my thread; Bleach the linen for my bed. They will call him brave.

I don't want to be classed as a humorist. It makes me feel guilty. I've never read a good tough quotable female humorist, and I never was one myself. I couldn't do it. A "smartcracker" they called me, and that makes me sick and unhappy. There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.

Scratch an actor and you'll find an actress.

The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. ... Obscenity is too valuable a commodity to chuck around all over the place; it should be taken out of the safe on special occasions only.

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He gives it to.