Top 100 Parker Dorothy Quotes
#1. Most good women are hidden treasures who are only safe because nobody looks for them.
Dorothy Parker
#2. Hollywood is the one place on earth where you could die of encouragement.
Dorothy Parker
#3. 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
#4. Some men break your heart in two, Some men fawn and flatter, Some men never look at you; And that cleans up the matter.
Dorothy Parker
#6. God's acre was her garden-spot, she said;
She sat there often, of the Summer days,
Little and slim and sweet, among the dead,
Her hair a fable in the leveled rays.
Dorothy Parker
#7. 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
#8. She realizes she doesn't know as much as God but feels she knows as much as God knew when he was her age.
Dorothy Parker
#9. Friends come and go but I wouldn't have thought you'd be one of them
Dorothy Parker
#10. It is that word 'hunny,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.
Dorothy Parker
#11. Maybe it is only I, but conditions are such these days, that if you use studiously correct grammar, people suspect you of homosexual tendencies.
Dorothy Parker
#12. Every fashion, the fashion before: in a duller dress.
Dorothy Parker
#13. [Suggesting an epitaph for herself:] This is on me.
Dorothy Parker
#14. Gratitude - the meanest and most snivelling attribute in the world.
Dorothy Parker
#15. There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.
[Interview, The Paris Review, Summer 1956]
Dorothy Parker
#17. This living, this living, this living Was never a project of mine.
Dorothy Parker
#18. There was a reason for the cost of those perfectly plain black dresses.
Dorothy Parker
#19. [To the British actor who annoyed her by repeated references to his busy 'shedule':] I think you're full of skit.
Dorothy Parker
#20. 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
#21. [Completely bored by a country weekend, wiring to a friend:] For heaven's sake, rush me a loaf of bread, enclosing saw and file.
Dorothy Parker
#22. Her big heart did not, as is so sadly often the case, inhabit a big bosom.
Dorothy Parker
#23. Emily Post's Etiquette is out again, this time in a new and an enlarged edition, and so the question of what to do with my evenings has been all fixed up for me.
Dorothy Parker
#24. Honesty means nothing until you are tested under circumstances where you are sure you could get away with dishonesty.
Dorothy Parker
#25. There was nothing separate about her days. Like drops on the window-pane, they ran together and trickled away.
Dorothy Parker
#26. Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.
Dorothy Parker
#27. [On the ringing of her doorbell or telephone:] What fresh hell is this?
Dorothy Parker
#29. Tommy and his little playmates don't regard being young as just one of those things that are likely to happen to anybody. They make a business of it. And
Dorothy Parker
#30. This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Dorothy Parker
#31. Oh, gallant was the first love, and glittering and fine;
The second love was water, in a clear white cup;
The third love was his, and the fourth was mine;
And after that, I always get them all mixed up.
Dorothy Parker
#32. Three highballs, and I think I'm St. Francis of Assisi.
Dorothy Parker
#33. 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
#35. Like many a better one before me, I have gone down under the force of numbers, under the books and books and books that keep coming out and coming out and coming out, shoals of them, spates of them, flash floods of them, too blame many books, and no sign of an end.
Dorothy Parker
#36. I shudder at the thought of men ... I'm due to fall in love again
Dorothy Parker
#37. Nevil Shute's On the Beach is no Christmas carol, but it seems to me a remarkably fine novel, one which I read, in the peculiarly repulsive phrase, with my eyes glued to the page.
Dorothy Parker
#38. Woman wants monogamy;
Man delights in novelty.
Love is woman's moon and sun;
Man has other forms of fun.
Woman lives but in her lord;
Count to ten, and man is bored.
With this the gist and sum of it,
What earthly good can come of it?
Dorothy Parker
#39. I wanted to be cute. That's the terrible thing. I should have had more sense.
Dorothy Parker
#41. You do what you can, and you do it because you should. But all you can do is all you can do.
Dorothy Parker
#43. By the time you swear you're his, shivering and sighing, And he vows his passion is infinite,undying-Lady,make a note of this: One of you is lying
Dorothy Parker
#44. The definition of eternity is two people and a ham.
Dorothy Parker
#46. 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
#47. Don't feel bad when I die; I've been dead for a long time.
Dorothy Parker
#48. I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn, but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.
Dorothy Parker
#49. [On being told their loquacious, domineering host was 'outspoken':] By whom?
Dorothy Parker
#50. Four be the things I'd have been better without: love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.
Dorothy Parker
#51. 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
#52. If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.
Dorothy Parker
#54. Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded
wheelchair.
Dorothy Parker
#55. Q: What's the difference between an enzyme and a hormone?
A: You can't hear an enzyme.
Dorothy Parker
#56. I give her sadness and the gift of pain,
a new moon madness and a love of rain.
Dorothy Parker
#57. Phoebe Wolkind Ephron cracked wise like Dorothy Parker and looked like Katharine Hepburn.
Hallie Ephron
#58. I never see that prettiest thing- A cherry bough gone white with Spring- But what I think, How gay 'twould be To hang me from a flowering tree.
Dorothy Parker
#59. The sun's gone dim, and the moon's gone black. For I loved him, and he didn't love back.
Dorothy Parker
#60. There was always something immensely comic to her in the thought of living elsewhere than New York. She could not regard as serious proposals that she share a western residence.
Dorothy Parker
#61. [On hearing that Clare Boothe Luce was invariably kind to her inferiors:] And where does she find them?
Dorothy Parker
#62. Robert Johnson invented the blues, at midnight, at a crossroads, after selling his soul to the devil. Dorothy Parker invented amusing women, at 2 p.m., in New York's best cocktail bar, after tipping a busboy 50 cents for a martini. It's hard not to draw conclusions as to which is the brighter sex.
Caitlin Moran
#63. The Swiss are a neat and an industrious people, none of whom is under seventy-five years of age.
Dorothy Parker
#64. 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.
Dorothy Parker
#65. Please don't let me hope, dear God. Please don't. I
Dorothy Parker
#66. The plot is so tired that even this reviewer, who in infancy was let drop by a nurse with the result that she has ever since been mystified by amateur coin tricks, was able to guess the identity of the murderer from the middle of the book.
Dorothy Parker
#67. My love runs by like a day in June, And he makes no friends of sorrows. He'll tread his galloping rigadoon In the pathway of the morrows. He'll live his days where the sunbeams start, Nor could storm or wind uproot him. My own dear love, he is all my heart,
And I wish somebody'd shoot him.
Dorothy Parker
#68. 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
#70. I think that the direction in which a writer should look is around.
Dorothy Parker
#71. If Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker had teamed up to write epic fantasy, something like Split Heirs might have resulted.
John DeChancie
#72. Should they whisper false of you, never trouble to deny. Should the words they say be true, weep and storm and swear they lie!
Dorothy Parker
#73. The only dependable law of life - everything is always worse than you thought it was going to be.
Dorothy Parker
#75. Of course I talk to myself. I like a good speaker, and I appreciate an intelligent audience.
Dorothy Parker
#76. The best way to avoid a hangover is to stay drunk.
Dorothy Parker
#77. [After she and Clare Boothe Luce met in a doorway and the latter said, 'Age before beauty':] Pearls before swine.
Dorothy Parker
#78. Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.
Dorothy Parker
#81. 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
#82. And if my heart be scarred and burned,
The safer, I, for all I learned.
Dorothy Parker
#83. Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it and it darts away.
Dorothy Parker
#84. Whether it's Dorothy Parker or Oscar Wilde, they're brilliant with genius bon mots. Of course, I find them extraordinary.
Duncan Roy
#85. Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.
Dorothy Parker
#87. Art is a form of catharsis emotional release, purging, cleansing, purifying.
Dorothy Parker
#88. 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
#89. His books are exciting and powerful and - if I may filch the word from the booksy ones - pulsing.
Dorothy Parker
#91. Now to me, Edith looks like something that would eat her young.
Dorothy Parker
#92. This isn't my head I've got on now. I think this is something that used to belong to Walt Whitman.
Dorothy Parker
#93. [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
#94. Excuse me, everybody, I have to go to the bathroom. I really have to telephone, but I'm too embarrassed to say so.
Dorothy Parker
#97. 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.
Dorothy Parker
#98. Los Angeles: Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.
Dorothy Parker
#99. If I should labor through daylight and dark,
Consecrate, valorous, serious, true,
Then on the world I may blazon my mark;
And what if I don't, and what if I do?
Dorothy Parker
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