Parker Dorothy Quotes & Sayings
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Top Parker Dorothy Quotes
I'm quite all right. I'm not even scared. You see, I've learned from looking around, there is something worse than loneliness - and that's the fear of it." - Dorothy Parker — Nicole Archer
This play John Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln holds the season's record, thus far, with a run of four evening performances and one matinee. By an odd coincidence, it ran just five performances too many. — Dorothy Parker
All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me. — Dorothy Parker
On lady novelists: As artists they're rot, but as providers they're oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter. — Dorothy Parker
I'll have a martini...two at the most. Three, I'm under the table...four, I'm under the host. — Dorothy Parker
The affair between Margot Asquinth and Margot Asquinth will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature. — Dorothy Parker
Once, when I was young and true. Someone left me sad - Broke my brittle heart in two; And that is very bad. Love is for unlucky folk, Love is but a curse. Once there was a heart I broke; And that, I think, is worse. — Dorothy Parker
To keep something, you must take care of it. More, you must understand just what sort of care it requires. You must know the rules and abide by them. She could do that. She had been doing it all the months, in the writing of her letters to him. There had been rules to be learned in that matter, and the first of them was the hardest: never say to him what you want him to say to you. Never tell him how sadly you miss him, how it grows no better, how each day without him is sharper than the day before. Set down for him the gay happenings about you, bright little anecdotes, not invented, necessarily, but attractively embellished. Do not bedevil him with the pinings of your faithful heart because he is your husband, your man, your love. For you are writing to none of these. You are writing to a soldier. — Dorothy Parker
I can't talk about Hollywood. It was a horror to me when I was there and it's a horror to look back on. I can't imagine how I did it. When I got away from it I couldn't even refer to the place by name. 'Out there,' I called it. — Dorothy Parker
When asked by her publisher why her work had not been submitted while on her honeymoon: I've been too fucking busy or vice versa — Dorothy Parker
There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil. — Dorothy Parker
I don't ask You to make it easy for me - You can't do that, for all that You could make a world. — Dorothy Parker
Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, 'You're all a lost generation.' That got around to certain people and we all said, 'Whee! We're lost. — Dorothy Parker
This level reach of blue is not my sea;
Here are sweet waters, pretty in the sun,
Whose quiet ripples meet obediently
A marked and measured line, one after one.
This is no sea of mine. that humbly laves
Untroubled sands, spread glittering and warm.
I have a need of wilder, crueler waves;
They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.
So let a love beat over me again,
Loosing its million desperate breakers wide;
Sudden and terrible to rise and wane;
Roaring the heavens apart; a reckless tide
That casts upon the heart, as it recedes,
Splinters and spars and dripping, salty weeds. — Dorothy Parker
All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends. — Dorothy Parker
The best way to avoid a hangover is to stay drunk. — Dorothy Parker
Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician. — Dorothy Parker
Benchley and I had an office in the old Life magazine that was so tiny, if it were an inch smaller it would have been adultery. — Dorothy Parker
The Swiss are a neat and an industrious people, none of whom is under seventy-five years of age. — Dorothy Parker
You think You're frightening me with Your hell, don't You? You think Your hell is worse than mine. — Dorothy Parker
My first love was Cinderella, but she ran off with another man. — Dorothy Parker
The days will rally, wreathing
Their crazy tarantelle;
And you must go on breathing,
But I'll be safe in hell.
Like January weather,
The years will bite and smart,
And pull your bones together
To wrap your chattering heart.
The pretty stuff you're made of
Will crack and crease and dry.
The thing you are afraid of
Will look from every eye.
You will go faltering after
The bright, imperious line,
And split your throat on laughter,
And burn your eyes with brine.
You will be frail and musty
With peering, furtive head,
Whilst I am young and lusty
Among the roaring dead. — Dorothy Parker
Of Orson Welles: It's like meeting God without dying. — Dorothy Parker
So, you're the man who can't spell 'fuck.'"
Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer after publishers had convinced Mailer to replace the word with a euphemism, 'fug,' in his 1948 book, "The Naked and the Dead. — Dorothy Parker
It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I can change seven. — Dorothy Parker
I hate almost all rich people, but I think I'd be darling at it. — Dorothy Parker
Civilization is coming to an end, you understand. — Dorothy Parker
When you're awake, all the men go and fall for you -
Sleep, pretty lady, and give me a chance
(From the poem "Lullaby") — Dorothy Parker
Lips that taste of tears, they say,
Are the best for kissing. — Dorothy Parker
I've seen the way he dances; it looks like something you do on Saint Walpurgis Night. — Dorothy Parker
"Hence," goes on the professor, "definitions of happiness are interesting." I suppose the best thing to do with that is to let is pass. Me, I never saw a definition of happiness that could detain me after train-time, but that may be a matter of lack of opportunity, of inattention, or of congenital rough luck. If definitions of happiness can keep Professor Phelps on his toes, that is little short of dandy. We might just as well get on along to the next statement, which goes like this: "One of the best" (we are still on definitions of happiness) "was given in my Senior year at college by Professor Timothy Dwight: 'The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts.'" Promptly one starts recalling such Happiness Boys as Nietzche, Socrates, de Maupassant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, and Poe."
-Review of the book, Happiness, by (Professor) William Lyon Phelps. Review title: The Professor Goes in for Sweetness and Light; November 5, 1927 — Dorothy Parker
Lady, lady, never start
Conversation toward your heart;
Keep your pretty words serene;
Never murmur what you mean.
Show yourself, by word and look,
Swift and shallow as a brook.
Be as cool and quick to go
As a drop of April snow;
Be as delicate and gay
As a cherry flower in May.
Lady, lady, never speak
Of the tears that burn your cheek-
She will never win him, whose
Words had shown she feared to lose.
Be you wise and never sad,
You will get your lovely lad.
Never serious be, nor true,
And your wish will come to you-
And if that makes you happy, kid,
You'll be the first it ever did. — Dorothy Parker
Bewildered is the fox who lives to find that grapes beyond reach can be really sour. — Dorothy Parker
I am at just that interesting age where i cannot keep out of things. I, too, must be in the know; I, too, must quote and sigh and nod wisely. — Dorothy Parker
Oh, it's so easy to be sweet to people before you love them. I — Dorothy Parker
Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves. — Dorothy Parker
I've finally gotten to the bottom of things. — Dorothy Parker
Once I was coming down a street in Beverly Hills and I saw a Cadillac about a block long, and out of the side window was a wonderfully slinky mink, and an arm, and at the end of the arm a hand in a white suede glove wrinkled around the wrist, and in the hand was a bagel with a bite out of it. — Dorothy Parker
Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness. — Dorothy Parker
According to that book, only one Marx contributed an unforgotten pun to the Round Tablers' vaunted word games. It wasn't Groucho, who must have been furious. Nor was it Harpo, who for all we know sat at the table naked. Nor was it Chico, who had more dangerous games elsewhere. It was Gummo. Evidently Gummo had a seat at that table at least once, and he made it count. Everybody knows that Dorothy Parker, challenged to make a sentence with the word horticulture, quipped as follows: "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." But who knew that Gummo, taking on euphoria, came up with this: LEFT TO RIGHT: Harpo, Zeppo, Chico, Groucho, and Gummo, 1957. "Go outside and play," Minnie told the brothers. "Which ones?" they asked. And she said: "Euphoria."* — Roy Blount Jr.
On being told of the death of former President Calvin Coolidge: How could they tell? — Dorothy Parker
Now to me, Edith looks like something that would eat her young. — Dorothy Parker
[From a window in the Writer's Building at MGM, which overlooked a cemetery:] Hello down there. It might interest you to know that up here we are just as dead as you are. — Dorothy Parker
If I had a shiny gun I could have a world of fun Speeding bullets through the brains Of the folks that cause me pains — Dorothy Parker
Newton's Fourth Law: Every action has an equal and opposite satisfaction. — Dorothy Parker
If I didn't care for fun and such, I'd probably amount to much, but I shall stay the way I am, because I do not give a damn. — Dorothy Parker
Well, there are always those who cannot distinguish between glitter and glamour ... the glamour of Isadora Duncan came from her great, torn, bewildered, foolhardy soul. — Dorothy Parker
It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes. — Dorothy Parker
[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. — Dorothy Parker
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? — Dorothy Parker
I don't know much about being a millionaire, but I'll bet I'd be darling at it. — Dorothy Parker
I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats. — J. Courtney Sullivan
Four things I am wiser to know: Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe. — Dorothy Parker
Art is a form of catharsis. — Dorothy Parker
Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart. — Dorothy Parker
There was nothing separate about her days. Like drops on the window-pane, they ran together and trickled away. — Dorothy Parker
The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue. — Dorothy Parker
Tell him I was too fucking busy-- or vice versa. — Dorothy Parker
I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours. — Dorothy Parker
They tire of quiet, that have known the storm — Dorothy Parker
Hollywood is the one place on earth where you could die of encouragement. — Dorothy Parker
I was always sweet, at first. Oh, it's so easy to be sweet to people before you love them. — Dorothy Parker
I wish, I wish I were a poisonous bacterium. — Dorothy Parker
As I was saying to the landlord only this morning: 'You can't have everything'. — Dorothy Parker
People are more than fun than anybody. — Dorothy Parker
If all the girls attending [the Yale prom] were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised. — Dorothy Parker
Travel, trouble, music, art, a kiss, a frock, a rhyme
I never said they feed my heart, but still they pass my time. — Dorothy Parker
I'm never going to accomplish anything; that's perfectly clear to me. I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more. — Dorothy Parker
First I brush my teeth and then I sharpen my tongue. — Oscar Levant
Mrs. Whittaker's dress was always studiously suited to its occasion; thus, her bearing had always that calm that only the correctly attired may enjoy. — Dorothy Parker
Despite his persecutions, Mr. [Upton] Sinclair reveals himself in Money Writes! to be an enviable man. Always the thing he desires to believe is the thing he feels he knows to be true. — Dorothy Parker
Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat. — Dorothy Parker
Women and elephants never forget. — Dorothy Parker
Now, look, baby, 'Union' is spelled with 5 letters. It is not a four-letter word. — Dorothy Parker
Art is a form of catharsis emotional release, purging, cleansing, purifying. — Dorothy Parker
Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both. — Dorothy Parker
It may be that this autobiography [Aimee Semple McPherson's] is set down in sincerity, frankness, and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario. — Dorothy Parker
Yes, well, let me tell you that if nobody had ever learned to quote, very few people would be in love with La Rochefoucauld. I bet you I don't know ten souls who read him without a middleman. — Dorothy Parker
A little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika. — Dorothy Parker
The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'cheque enclosed. — Dorothy Parker
They are sad books, filled with sad and skinless people. There are some who do not like such books. The world, too, is crowded with the sorrowful and the sensitive. There are many who do not like such a world. — Dorothy Parker
Phoebe Wolkind Ephron cracked wise like Dorothy Parker and looked like Katharine Hepburn. — Hallie Ephron
Daily dawns another day;
I must up, to make my way.
Though I dress and drink and eat,
Move my fingers and my feet,
Learn a little, here and there,
Weep and laugh and sweat and swear,
Hear a song, or watch a stage,
Leave some words upon a page,
Claim a foe, or hail a friend-
Bed awaits me at the end. — Dorothy Parker
Scratch a lover, and find a foe. — Dorothy Parker
It costs me never a stab nor squirm / To tread by chance upon a worm. / Aha, my little dear, / I say, Your clan will pay me back one day. — Dorothy Parker
Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants. — Dorothy Parker
[On being told their loquacious, domineering host was 'outspoken':] By whom? — Dorothy Parker
Accursed from their birth they be Who seek to find monogamy, Pursuing it from bed to bed - I think they would be better dead. — Dorothy Parker
[On an actor who'd broken her leg in London:] Oh, how terrible. She must have done it sliding down a barrister. — Dorothy Parker
All I have to be thankful for in this world is that I was sitting down when my garter busted. — Dorothy Parker
If Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker had teamed up to write epic fantasy, something like Split Heirs might have resulted. — John DeChancie
As for helping me in the outside world, the Convent taught me only that if you spit on a pencil eraser, it will erase ink. — Dorothy Parker
Oh, anywhere, driver, anywhere - it doesn't matter. Just keep driving.
It's better here in this taxi than it was walking. It's no good my trying to walk. There is always a glimpse through the crowd of someone who looks like him - someone with his swing of the shoulders, his slant of the hat. And I think it's he, I think he's come back. And my heart goes to scalding water and the buildings sway and bend above me. No, it's better to be here. But I wish the driver would go fast, so fast that people walking by would be a long gray blur, and I could see no swinging shoulders, no slanted hat.
Dorothy Parker, Sentiment, Harper's Bazaar, May 1933. — Dorothy Parker
There was a reason for the cost of those perfectly plain black dresses. — Dorothy Parker