Dorothy Parker Quotes

Flowers are heaven's masterpiece.

Oh, both my shoes are shiny new,
And pristine is my hat
My dress is 1922 ...
My life is all like that.

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.

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.

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.

She realizes she doesn't know as much as God but feels she knows as much as God knew when he was her age.

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.

My own dear love, he is all my world -
And I wish I'd never met him.

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.

Where's the man that could ease a heart like a satin gown?

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!

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.

Women and elephants never forget.

Three highballs, and I think I'm St. Francis of Assisi.

Art is a form of catharsis emotional release, purging, cleansing, purifying.

People are more fun than anyone.

When you have to apologize, it is well, I suppose, to get the thing over quickly ...

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.

Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.

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.

[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.

A girl's best friend is her mutter.

The House Beautiful is the play lousy.

Authors and actors and artists and such - Never know nothing, and never know much.

Quick!! Act as if nothing has happened!

[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 ...

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.

Guns aren't lawful; nooses give; gas smells awful. So you might as well live.

Eternity is a ham and two people.

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

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?

Age before beauty, and pearls before swine.

She was pleased to have him come and never sorry to see him go.

Go to the Martin Beck Theatre and watch Katherine Hepburn run the gamut of emotions from A to B.

Of Orson Welles: It's like meeting God without dying.

I know I have been happiest at your side;
But what is done, is done, and all's to be.
And small the good, to linger dolefully-
Gayly it lived, and gallantly it died.
I will not make you songs of hearts denied,
And you, being man, would have no tears of me,
And should I offer you fidelity,
You'd be, I think, a little terrified.
Yet this the need of woman, this her curse:
To range her little gifts, and give, and give,
Because the throb of giving's sweet to bear.
To you, who never begged me vows or verse,
My gift shall be my absence, while I live;
But after that, my dear, I cannot swear.

Travel, trouble, music, art, a kiss, a frock, a rhyme
I never said they feed my heart, but still they pass my time.

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.

This living, this living, this living Was never a project of mine.

Now to me, Edith looks like something that would eat her young.

A hangover is the wrath of grapes.

Don't feel bad when I die; I've been dead for a long time.

Scratch a lover, and find a foe.

When your bank account is so overdrawn that it is positively photographic, steps must be taken.

He'll be cross if he sees I have been crying. They don't like you to cry. He doesn't cry. I wish to God I could make him cry. I wish I could make him cry and tread the floor and feel his heart heavy and big and festering in him. I wish I could hurt him like hell.
He doesn't wish that about me. I don't think he even knows how he makes me feel. I wish he could know, without my telling him. They don't like you to tell them they've made you cry. They don't like you to tell them you're unhappy because of them. If you do, they think you're possessive and exacting. And then they hate you. They hate you whenever you say anything you really think. You always have to keep playing little games. Oh, I thought we didn't have to; I thought this was so big I could say whatever I meant. I guess you can't, ever. I guess there isn't ever anything big enough for that.

Lips that taste of tears, they say,
Are the best for kissing.

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?

It was written without fear and without research.

And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

[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.

Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.

What writes worse than a Theodore Dreiser? ... Two Theodore Dreisers.

If you looked for things to make you feel hurt and wretched and unnecessary, you were certain to find them ...

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.

My first love was Cinderella, but she ran off with another man.

Civilization is coming to an end, you understand.

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

Summer makes me drowsy. Autumn makes me sing. Winter's pretty lousy, but I hate Spring.

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.

Money is only congealed snow.

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.

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.

All men are the same age.

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

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

Q: What's the difference between an enzyme and a hormone?
A: You can't hear an enzyme.

You don't want a general houseworker, do you? Or a traveling companion, quiet, refined, speaks fluent French entirely in the present tense? Or an assistant billiard-maker? Or a private librarian? Or a lady car-washer? Because if you do, I should appreciate your giving me a trial at the job. Any minute now, I am going to become one of the Great Unemployed. I am about to leave literature flat on its face. I don't want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.

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

They tire of quiet, that have known the storm

Hold your pen and spare your voice.

I was always sweet, at first. Oh, it's so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.

Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.

And where does she find them?

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.

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.

The best way to avoid a hangover is to stay drunk.

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.

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

Innocence is a desirable thing, a dainty thing, an appealing thing, in its place; but carried too far, it is merely ridiculous.

The Swiss are a neat and an industrious people, none of whom is under seventy-five years of age.

Sometimes I think I'll give up trying, and just go completely Russian and sit on a stove and moan all day.

Maybe it is only I, but conditions are such these days, that if you use studiously correct grammar, people suspect you of homosexual tendencies.

[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.

I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.

Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.

People are more than fun than anybody.

[On Kay Strozzi in The Silent Witness:] Miss Strozzi ... had the temerity to wear as truly horrible a gown as ever I have seen on the American stage ... Had she not luckily been strangled by a member of the cast while disporting this garment, I should have fought my way to the stage and done her in, myself.

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.

Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness.

The ladies men admire, I've heard, Would shudder at a wicked word. Their candle gives a single light, They'd rather stay at home at night. They do not keep awake 'till three, Nor read erotic poetry. They never sanction the impure, Nor recognize an overture. They shrink from powders and from paints ... So far I've had no complaints.

Please don't let me hope, dear God. Please don't. I

You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.

I like to think of my shining tombstone. It gives me, as you might say, something to live for.

There's little in taking or giving, There's little in water or wine: This living, this living, this living, Was never a project of mine. Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is The gain of the one at the top, For art is a form of catharsis, And love is a permanent flop, And work is the province of cattle, And rest's for a clam in a shell, So I'm thinking of throwing the battle - Would you kindly direct me to hell?

Honesty means nothing until you are tested under circumstances where you are sure you could get away with dishonesty.

[When asked what was the inspiration for most of her work:] Need of money, dear.

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.

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.

I hate writing, I love having written.

Said after she had been seriously ill: The doctors were very brave about it.