Dorothy Parker > Quotes

“I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.”
― Dorothy Parker

“People Who Do Things exceed my endurance;
God, for a man that solicits insurance!”
― dorothy parker

“LINSCOTT: Well, life certainly treats you fine.
CONNIE: No, Tom. Life and I go Dutch.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Ladies of the Corridor

“I think that the direction in which a writer should look is around.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Never throw mud. You may miss your mark, but you will have dirty hands.”
― Dorothy Parker

“His books are exciting and powerful and — if I may filch the word from the booksy ones — pulsing.”
― 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, The Portable Dorothy Parker

“Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn....”
― Dorothy Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker

“You can’t take it with you, and even if you did, it would probably melt.”
― 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, The Portable Dorothy Parker

“Lips that taste of tears, they say,
Are the best for kissing.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Poetry and Short Stories of Dorothy Parker

“The House Beautiful is, for me, the play lousy.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Coda"

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?”
― 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, The Portable Dorothy Parker

“L'amour c'est comme du mercure dans la main. Garde-là ouverte, il te restera dans la paume ; resserre ton étreinte, il te filera entre les doigts.”
― 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

“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 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.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Complete Poems of 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, Complete Stories

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

“The lads I've met in cupid's deadlock
Were - shall we say? - born out of wedlock”
― Dorothy Parker

“Oh, it's so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Poetry and Short Stories of Dorothy Parker

“Every love's the love before
In a duller dress.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Poetry and Short Stories of 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, Here We Are

“I'll have a martini...two at the most. Three, I'm under the table...four, I'm under the host.”
― Dorohy 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

“All right, God, send me to hell. You think You're frightening me with Your hell, don't You? You think Your hell is worse than mine.”
― Dorothy Parker, A Telephone Call

“...I have read but little of Madame Glyn. I did not know that things like "It" were going on. I have misspent my days. When I think of all those hours I flung away in reading William James and Santayana, when I might have been reading of life, throbbing, beating, perfumed life, I practically break down. Where, I ask you, have I been, that no true word of Madame Glyn's literary feats has come to me?

But even those far, far better informed than I must work a bit over the opening sentence of Madame Glyn's foreword to her novel" "This is not," the says, drawing her emeralds warmly about her, "the story of the moving picture entitled It, but a full character study of the story It, which the people in the picture read and discuss." I could go mad, in a nice way, straining to figure that out.

...Well it turns out that Ava and John meet, and he begins promptly to "vibrate with passion." ...
...It goes on for nearly three hundred pages, with both of them vibrating away like steam launches."

-Review of the book, It, by Elinor Glyn. Review title: Madame Glyn Lectures on "It," with Illustrations; November 26, 1927.”
― Dorothy Parker, Constant Reader: 2

“For years I have been crouching in corners hissing small and ladylike anathema of Theodore Dreiser.”
― Dorothy Parker