Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Dorothy Parker, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Dorothy Parker quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 326 Dorothy Parker quotes for you to read and share.
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
Telegram to a friend who had just become a mother after a prolonged pregnancy: Good work, Mary. We all knew you had it in you. -- Dorothy Parker
She dreamed by day of never again putting on tight shoes, of never having to laugh and listen and admire, of never more being a good sport. Never. -- Dorothy Parker
I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem. -- Dorothy Parker
[Suggesting an epitaph for herself:] This is on me. -- Dorothy Parker
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
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
[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
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
(Scottish Terriers) have all the compactness of a small dog and all the valor of a big one. And they are so exceedingly sturdy that it is proverbial that the only thing fatal to them is being run over by an automobile - in which case the car itself knows it has been in a fight. -- Dorothy Parker
I know that an author must be brave enough to chop away clinging tentacles of good taste for the sake of a great work. But this is no great work, you see. -- Dorothy Parker
I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
after four I'm under my host. -- Dorothy Parker
I give her sadness and the gift of pain,
a new moon madness and a love of rain. -- Dorothy Parker
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
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
Dear Mary: We all knew you had it in you. -- Dorothy Parker
His voice was as intimate as the rustle of sheets. -- Dorothy Parker
Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician. -- Dorothy Parker
The lads I've met in cupid's deadlock
Were - shall we say? - born out of wedlock -- Dorothy Parker
And if my heart be scarred and burned,
The safer, I, for all I learned. -- Dorothy Parker
Don't look at me in that tone of voice. -- Dorothy Parker
Why, after all, should readers never be harrowed? Surely there is enough happiness in life without having to go to books for it. -- Dorothy Parker
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
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
Summer makes me drowsy. Autumn makes me sing. Winter's pretty lousy, but I hate Spring. -- Dorothy Parker
All I have to be thankful for in this world is that I was sitting down when my garter busted. -- 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
Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness. -- Dorothy Parker
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
Guns aren't lawful; nooses give; gas smells awful. So you might as well live. -- Dorothy Parker
The Monte Carlo casino refused to admit me until I was properly dressed so I went and found my stockings, and then came back and lost my shirt. -- Dorothy Parker
Eternity is a ham and two people" (also given as "Eternity is two people and a ham") is an old quip from the days when a ham was huge - far more than two people could finish. Irma Rombauer mentions this line in her famous cookbook, The Joy of Cooking. -- Dorothy Parker
I like to think of my shining tombstone. It gives me, as you might say, something to live for. -- 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
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. -- Dorothy Parker
The House Beautiful is the play lousy. -- Dorothy Parker
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
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
I wish I could drink like a lady
I can take one or two at the most
Three and I'm under the table
Four and I'm under the host. -- Dorothy Parker
Women and elephants never forget. -- Dorothy Parker
Now I know the things I know, and I do the things I do; and if you do not like me so, to hell, my love, with you! -- Dorothy Parker
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
Because your eyes are slant and slow,
Because your hair is sweet to touch,
My heart is high again; but oh,
I doubt if this will get me much. -- Dorothy Parker
Q: What's the difference between an enzyme and a hormone?
A: You can't hear an enzyme. -- Dorothy Parker
The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'cheque enclosed. -- 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
Where's the man that could ease a heart like a satin gown? -- 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
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
Of course I talk to myself. I like a good speaker, and I appreciate an intelligent audience. -- Dorothy Parker
As I was saying to the landlord only this morning: 'You can't have everything'. -- 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 had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen.
[From a column dated November 17, 1928] -- Dorothy Parker
Sometimes I think I'll give up trying, and just go completely Russian and sit on a stove and moan all day. -- Dorothy Parker
Men don't like nobility in woman. Not any men. I suppose it is because the men like to have the copyrights on nobility
if there is going to be anything like that in a relationship. -- 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
Where unwilling dies the rose; buds the new another year. -- Dorothy Parker
Los Angeles: Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city. -- Dorothy Parker
[When asked what was the inspiration for most of her work:] Need of money, dear. -- Dorothy Parker
You think You're frightening me with Your hell, don't You? You think Your hell is worse than mine. -- Dorothy Parker
London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it. -- Dorothy Parker
Dance, you jazz-mad puppets of fate, and -- Dorothy Parker
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
The only dependable law of life - everything is always worse than you thought it was going to be. -- Dorothy Parker
[On James Gould Cozzens' By Love Possessed:] It is a vast enterprise encompassing all sorts of love, except, naturally, those branches which extend to Jews, Negroes, and people who have lost track of their great-grandparents ... -- Dorothy Parker
Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves. -- Dorothy Parker
Quick!! Act as if nothing has happened! -- Dorothy Parker
My verses, I cannot say poems ... I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers. -- Dorothy Parker
Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye. -- Dorothy Parker
Please don't let me hope, dear God. Please don't. I -- Dorothy Parker
The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires. -- Dorothy Parker
[On Edna Ferber's Ice Palace] ... the book, which is going to be a movie, has the plot and characters of a book which is going to be a movie. -- Dorothy Parker
Most good women are hidden treasures who are only safe because nobody looks for them. -- Dorothy Parker
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. -- Dorothy Parker
This is me apologizing. I am a fool, a bird-brain, a liar and a horse-thief. I wouldn't touch a superlative again with an umbrella. -- Dorothy Parker
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
Constant use had not worn ragged the fabric of their friendship. -- Dorothy Parker
When I was young and bold and strong,
The right was right, the wrong was wrong.
With plume on high and flag unfurled,
I rode away to right the world.
But now I'm old - and good and bad,
Are woven in a crazy plaid.
I sit and say the world is so,
And wise is s/he who lets it go. -- Dorothy Parker
The House Beautiful is, for me, the play lousy. -- Dorothy Parker
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. -- Dorothy Parker
There is entirely too much charm around, and something must be done to stop it. -- Dorothy Parker
Four things I am wiser to know: Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe. -- Dorothy Parker
A liberal is a man who leaves the room before the fight starts. -- 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
If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular? -- Dorothy Parker
The best way to avoid a hangover is to stay drunk. -- Dorothy Parker
Her mind lives tidily, apart from cold and noise and pain. And bolts the door against her heart, out wailing in the rain. -- Dorothy Parker
My land is bare of chattering folk; / the clouds are low along the ridges, / and sweet's the air with curly smoke / from all my burning bridges. -- Dorothy Parker
The only "ism" Hollywood believes in is plagiarism. -- Dorothy Parker
Sure, you make money writing on the coast ... but that money is like so much compressed snow. It goes so fast it melts in your hand. -- Dorothy Parker
Friends come and go but I wouldn't have thought you'd be one of them -- Dorothy Parker
Innocence is a desirable thing, a dainty thing, an appealing thing, in its place; but carried too far, it is merely ridiculous. -- Dorothy Parker
If all the young ladies who attended the Yale promenade dance were laid end to end, no one would be the least surprised. -- 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
Art is a form of catharsis emotional release, purging, cleansing, purifying. -- Dorothy Parker
Somebody was using the pencil. -- Dorothy Parker
Newton's Fourth Law: Every action has an equal and opposite satisfaction. -- Dorothy Parker
This living, this living, this living Was never a project of mine. -- Dorothy Parker
There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind ... There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it. -- Dorothy Parker
Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded
wheelchair. -- Dorothy Parker
[To the British actor who annoyed her by repeated references to his busy 'shedule':] I think you're full of skit. -- Dorothy Parker
You do what you can, and you do it because you should. But all you can do is all you can do. -- Dorothy Parker
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, a medley of extemporanea, And love is a thing that can never go wrong, and I am Marie of Romania. -- 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
I shudder at the thought of men ... I'm due to fall in love again -- Dorothy Parker
I've finally gotten to the bottom of things. -- Dorothy Parker
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
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
Every love's the love before
In a duller dress. -- Dorothy Parker
[At the reception following her remarriage to Alan Campbell:] People who haven't talked to each other in years are on speaking terms again today - including the bride and groom. -- Dorothy Parker
One more drink and I'd have been under the host. -- 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
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
The sun's gone dim, and the moon's gone black. For I loved him, and he didn't love back. -- Dorothy Parker
Why is it no one sent me yet one perfect limousine, do you suppose? Ah no, it's always just my luck to get one perfect rose. -- 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
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
Scratch a lover, and find a foe. -- Dorothy Parker
It turns out that, at social gatherings, as a source of entertainment, conviviality, and good fun, I rank somewhere between a sprig of parsley and a single ice-skate. -- Dorothy Parker
Civilization is coming to an end, you understand. -- Dorothy Parker
Never throw mud: you can miss the target, but your hands will remain dirty. -- Dorothy Parker
Lips that taste of tears, they say,
Are the best for kissing. -- Dorothy Parker
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
Flowers are heaven's masterpiece. -- Dorothy Parker
I think that the direction in which a writer should look is around. -- 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
His books are exciting and powerful and - if I may filch the word from the booksy ones - pulsing. -- Dorothy Parker
Sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion. -- Dorothy Parker
Writing well is the best revenge. -- Dorothy Parker
I require three things in a man: he must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid. -- Dorothy Parker
The sweeter the apple, the blacker the core. Scratch a lover and find a foe! -- Dorothy Parker
I don't know much about being a millionaire, but I'll bet I'd be darling at it. -- 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
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
I was the toast of two continents: Greenland and Australia. -- Dorothy Parker
Upton Sinclair is his own King Charles' head. He cannot keep himself out of his writings, try though he may; or, by this time, try though he doesn't. -- Dorothy Parker
Oh, it's so easy to be sweet to people before you love them. I -- Dorothy Parker
I was always sweet, at first. Oh, it's so easy to be sweet to people before you love them. -- Dorothy Parker
[On being told party guests were ducking for apples:] There, but for a typographical error, is the story of my life. -- Dorothy Parker
[On Katharine Hepburn's stage performance:] She ran the whole gamut of emotions, from A to B. -- Dorothy Parker
Of Orson Welles: It's like meeting God without dying. -- Dorothy Parker
The Swiss are a neat and an industrious people, none of whom is under seventy-five years of age. -- Dorothy Parker
[On the ringing of her doorbell or telephone:] What fresh hell is this? -- Dorothy Parker
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? -- Dorothy Parker
I don't mind anything that's written about me, as long as it's not true. -- 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
[Requesting her epitaph to read this way:] Excuse my dust. -- Dorothy Parker
If this world were anything near what it should be there would be no more need of a Book Week than there would be a of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. -- Dorothy Parker
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
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
I can't write five words but that I change seven. -- Dorothy Parker
Never throw mud. You may miss your mark, but you will have dirty hands. -- Dorothy Parker
Gratitude - the meanest and most snivelling attribute in the world. -- Dorothy Parker
Eternity is a ham and two people. -- Dorothy Parker
You can't teach an old dogma new tricks. -- Dorothy Parker
And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word. -- Dorothy Parker
[On hearing that Clare Boothe Luce was invariably kind to her inferiors:] And where does she find them? -- Dorothy Parker
There are times when images blow to fluff, and comparisons stiffen and shrivel. -- Dorothy Parker
Four be the things I'd have been better without: love, curiosity, freckles and doubt. -- Dorothy Parker
For herself, she declared that she paid no attention to her birthdays - didn't give a hoot about them; and it is true that when you have amassed several dozen of the same sort of thing, it loses that rarity which is the excitement of collectors. -- Dorothy Parker
Said of her husband on the day their divorce became final: Oh, don't worry about Alan ... Alan will always land on somebody's feet. -- Dorothy Parker
It was written without fear and without research. -- Dorothy Parker
The affair between Margot Asquinth and Margot Asquinth will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature. -- Dorothy Parker
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
If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to. -- Dorothy Parker
I don't know," she said. "We used to squabble a lot when we were going together and then engaged and everything, but I thought everything would be so different as soon as you were married. And now I feel so sort of strange and everything. I feel so sort of alone. -- Dorothy Parker
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. -- Dorothy Parker
Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone. -- Dorothy Parker
If I had any decency, I'd be dead. Most of my friends are. -- Dorothy Parker
Honesty means nothing until you are tested under circumstances where you are sure you could get away with dishonesty. -- Dorothy Parker
Mrs. Ewing was a short woman who accepted the obligation borne by so many short women to make up in vivacity what they lack in number of inches from the ground. -- Dorothy Parker
I misremember who first was cruel enough to nurture the cocktail party into life. But perhaps it would be not too much to say, in fact it would be not enough to say, that it was not worth the trouble. -- Dorothy Parker
I wanted to be cute. That's the terrible thing. I should have had more sense. -- Dorothy Parker
Hold your pen and spare your voice. -- Dorothy Parker
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. -- Dorothy Parker
If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy. -- Dorothy Parker
That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment. -- Dorothy Parker
He is a writer for the ages, the ages of four to eight. -- Dorothy Parker
Oh, seek, my love, your newer way; I'll not be left in sorrow. So long as I have yesterday, Go take your damned tomorrow! -- Dorothy Parker
Ah, clear they see and true they say
That one shall weep, and one shall stray -- Dorothy Parker
She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B. -- Dorothy Parker
[After she and Clare Boothe Luce met in a doorway and the latter said, 'Age before beauty':] Pearls before swine. -- Dorothy Parker
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
All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends. -- Dorothy Parker
Every fashion, the fashion before: in a duller dress. -- Dorothy Parker
Money is only congealed snow. -- Dorothy Parker
If all the girls attending [the Yale prom] were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised. -- Dorothy Parker
That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say 'No' in any of them. -- Dorothy Parker
He's always with me, he and all his beauty and his cruelty. -- Dorothy Parker
Now to me, Edith looks like something that would eat her young. -- Dorothy Parker
My first love was Cinderella, but she ran off with another man. -- Dorothy Parker
Age before beauty, and pearls before swine. -- Dorothy Parker
It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes. -- Dorothy Parker
There was a reason for the cost of those perfectly plain black dresses. -- Dorothy Parker
There was nothing separate about her days. Like drops on the window-pane, they ran together and trickled away. -- Dorothy Parker
Oh, both my shoes are shiny new,
And pristine is my hat
My dress is 1922 ...
My life is all like that. -- Dorothy Parker
This isn't my head I've got on now. I think this is something that used to belong to Walt Whitman. -- Dorothy Parker
At birth the Devil touched my tongue. -- Dorothy Parker
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
The cleverest woman on earth is the biggest fool on earth with a man. -- Dorothy Parker
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. -- Dorothy Parker
He and I had an office so tiny, that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery. -- Dorothy Parker
I've seen the way he dances; it looks like something you do on Saint Walpurgis Night. -- Dorothy Parker
Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both. -- Dorothy Parker
Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night. -- Dorothy Parker
They tire of quiet, that have known the storm -- Dorothy Parker
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
[On an actor who'd broken her leg in London:] Oh, how terrible. She must have done it sliding down a barrister. -- 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
Money was made, not to command our will, But all our lawful pleasures to fulfill. Shame and woe to us, if we our wealth obey; The horse doth with the horseman away. -- Dorothy Parker
And where does she find them? -- Dorothy Parker
She can sit up and beg, and
she can give her paw
I don't say she will, but she can. -- Dorothy Parker
Into love and out again, Thus I went and thus I go. Spare your voice, and hold your pen: Well and bitterly I know All the songs were ever sung, All the words were ever said; Could it be, when I was young, Someone dropped me on my head? -- Dorothy Parker
Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat. -- Dorothy Parker
It's easier to write about those you hate - just as it's easier to criticize a bad play or a bad book. -- Dorothy Parker
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
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
Genius can write on the back of old envelopes but mere talent requires the finest stationery available. -- Dorothy Parker
Authors and actors and artists and such - Never know nothing, and never know much. -- Dorothy Parker
And let her loves, when she is dead
Write this above her bones,
No more she lives to give us bread
Who asked her only stones. -- Dorothy Parker
A girl's best friend is her mutter. -- Dorothy Parker
Brevity is the soul of lingerie. -- 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
I'm of the glamorous ladies At whose beckoning history shook. But you are a man, and see only my pan, So I stay at home with a book. -- Dorothy Parker
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. -- Dorothy Parker
I hate almost all rich people, but I think I'd be darling at it. -- Dorothy Parker
The definition of eternity is two people and a ham. -- Dorothy Parker
Ducking for apples
change one letter and it's the story of my life. -- 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
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. -- Dorothy Parker
People are more fun than anyone. -- Dorothy Parker
And when it ends, only those places where you have known sorrow are kindly to you. If you revisit the scenes of your happiness, your heart must burst of its agony. And -- Dorothy Parker
You can't take it with you, and even if you did, it would probably melt. -- Dorothy Parker
A list of authors who have made themselves most beloved and therefore, most comfortable financially, shows that it is our national joy to mistake for the first-rate, the fecund rate. -- 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
Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it and it darts away. -- Dorothy Parker
Hollywood is the one place on earth where you could die of encouragement. -- Dorothy Parker
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
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
Scratch a king and find a fool! -- Dorothy Parker
Her big heart did not, as is so sadly often the case, inhabit a big bosom. -- Dorothy Parker
Three highballs, and I think I'm St. Francis of Assisi. -- Dorothy Parker
Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common. -- Dorothy Parker
Don't feel bad when I die; I've been dead for a long time. -- Dorothy Parker
[On being told their loquacious, domineering host was 'outspoken':] By whom? -- Dorothy Parker
Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne. -- Dorothy Parker
Time doth flit; oh shit. -- 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
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
I wish, I wish I were a poisonous bacterium. -- Dorothy Parker
For years I have been crouching in corners hissing small and ladylike anathema of Theodore Dreiser. -- Dorothy Parker
Tonstant Weader fwowed up. -- Dorothy Parker
For a few minutes, everything is so cute that the mind reels ... And then, believe it or not, things get worse. So I shot myself. -- Dorothy Parker
But I give you my word, in the entire book there is nothing that cannot be said aloud in mixed company. And there is, also, nothing that makes you a bit the wiser. I wonder
oh, what will you think of me
if those two statements do not verge upon the synonymous. -- Dorothy Parker
They sicken of the calm who know the storm. -- Dorothy Parker
Honest, I won't ever do it again. I'll go straight, after this. I'll never go to bed again, if I can only sleep now. -- Dorothy Parker
This must be a gift book. That is to say a book, which you wouldn't take on any other terms. -- Dorothy Parker
[Hospitalized and pressing the nurse's button before dictating letters to her secretary:] This should assure us of at least forty-five minutes of undisturbed privacy. -- Dorothy Parker
Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, can be prolonged to the point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation. -- Dorothy Parker
What writes worse than a Theodore Dreiser? ... Two Theodore Dreisers. -- Dorothy Parker
She is happy, for she knows
That her dust is very pretty -- Dorothy Parker
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it.
[Women Know Everything!] -- Dorothy Parker
Yes, I once was the toast of two continents! ( ... Greenland & Australia). -- Dorothy Parker
I'd like to have money. And I'd like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that's too adorable, I'd rather have money. -- Dorothy Parker
If you looked for things to make you feel hurt and wretched and unnecessary, you were certain to find them ... -- Dorothy Parker
Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart. -- Dorothy Parker
The only useful thing I ever learned in school was that if you spit on your eraser it erased ink. -- Dorothy Parker
I fell into writing, I suppose, being one of those awful children who wrote verses. I went to a convent in New York-the Blessed Sacrament ... I was fired from there, finally, for a lot of things, among them my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion. -- Dorothy Parker
Vice is nice, but liquor is quicker. -- Dorothy Parker
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. -- 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
It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard. -- Dorothy Parker
[On Oscar Wilde:]
If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.
[Life Magazine, June 2, 1927] -- Dorothy Parker
tomorrow's gone-we'll have tonight! -- Dorothy Parker
A hangover is the wrath of grapes. -- Dorothy Parker
Said after she had been seriously ill: The doctors were very brave about it. -- Dorothy Parker
Trapped like a trap in a trap -- Dorothy Parker
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song -- Dorothy Parker
LINSCOTT: Well, life certainly treats you fine.
CONNIE: No, Tom. Life and I go Dutch. -- Dorothy Parker
Tell him I was too fucking busy-- or vice versa. -- Dorothy Parker
If you wear a short enough skirt, the party will come to you. -- Dorothy Parker
People ought to be one of two things, young or dead. -- Dorothy Parker
People Who Do Things exceed my endurance;
God, for a man that solicits insurance! -- Dorothy Parker
I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true. -- Dorothy Parker
Years are only garments, and you either wear them with style all your life, or else you go dowdy to the grave. -- Dorothy Parker
Prince or commoner, tenor or bass,
Painter or plumber or never-do-well,
Do me a favor and shut your face -
Poets alone should kiss and tell. -- Dorothy Parker
Art is a form of catharsis. -- Dorothy Parker
On being told of the death of former President Calvin Coolidge: How could they tell? -- Dorothy Parker
But I don't give up; I forget why not. -- Dorothy Parker
Everybody's got their troubles. -- Dorothy Parker
He lies below, correct in cypress wood, And entertains the most exclusive worms. -- Dorothy Parker
[On Dashiell Hammett:] ... he is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn. -- Dorothy Parker
My own dear love, he is all my world -
And I wish I'd never met him. -- Dorothy Parker
[To woman bragging about having kept her husband for seven years:] Don't worry, if you keep him long enough, he'll come back in style. -- Dorothy Parker
When you have to apologize, it is well, I suppose, to get the thing over quickly ... -- 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
The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue. -- Dorothy Parker
Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.) -- 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
She was pleased to have him come and never sorry to see him go. -- Dorothy Parker
When your bank account is so overdrawn that it is positively photographic, steps must be taken. -- Dorothy Parker
I hate writing, I love having written. -- Dorothy Parker
How do people go to sleep? I'm afraid I've lost the knack. -- Dorothy Parker
People are more than fun than anybody. -- Dorothy Parker
Hollywood money isn't money. It's congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are. -- Dorothy Parker
If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you. -- Dorothy Parker
Bewildered is the fox who lives to find that grapes beyond reach can be really sour. -- Dorothy Parker
Go to the Martin Beck Theatre and watch Katherine Hepburn run the gamut of emotions from A to B. -- 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
Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn ... -- Dorothy Parker
I've never been a millionaire but I know I'd be just darling at it. -- Dorothy Parker
Somewhere, there, is an analogy, in a small way, if you have the patience for it. But I guess it isn't a very good anecdote. I'm better at animal stories. -- Dorothy Parker
I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon. -- 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
Anthologists are lazy fellows who like to spend a quiet evening at home raiding good books. -- Dorothy Parker
And I'll stay off Verlaine too; he was always chasing Rimbauds. -- Dorothy Parker
You were perfectly fine. -- Dorothy Parker
Now, look, baby, 'Union' is spelled with 5 letters. It is not a four-letter word. -- Dorothy Parker
Hollywood is one place in the world where you can die of encouragement. -- Dorothy Parker
[On hearing that President Coolidge was dead:] How can you tell? -- Dorothy Parker
A little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika. -- Dorothy Parker
All men are the same age. -- Dorothy Parker
Their pooled emotions wouldn't fill a teaspoon. -- Dorothy Parker
She will never win him, whose words had shown she feared to lose. -- Dorothy Parker
You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think. -- 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