Dorothy Parker > Quotes

“The Veteran

When I was young and bold and strong,
Oh, right was right, and wrong was wrong!
My plume on high, my flag unfurled,
I rode away to right the world.
“Come out, you dogs, and fight!” said I,
And wept there was but once to die.

But I am old; and good and bad
Are woven in a crazy plaid.
I sit and say, “The world is so;
And he is wise who lets it go.
A battle lost, a battle won-
The difference is small, my son.”

Inertia rides and riddles me;
The which is called Philosophy.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Iubirea e ca mercurul in mana. Tine-o deschisa si iti va ramane in plama; strange pumnul si iti va curge printre degete.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Let the past die, my child, and go gaily on from its unmarked grave.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“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, Complete Stories

“Oh, it’s so easy to be sweet to people before you love them. I”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“Love is like quick-silver in the hand, Sylvie. Leave the fingers open and it stays in the palm; clutch it, and it darts away.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“Please don’t let me hope, dear God. Please don’t. I”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“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, The Portable Dorothy Parker

“I wish he were dead. That's a terrible wish. That's a lovely wish. If he were dead, he would be mine. If he were dead, I would never think of now and the last few weeks. I would remember only the lovely times. It would be all beautiful. I wish he were dead. I wish he were dead, dead, dead.”
― Dorothy Parker, A Telephone Call

“There is youth to my game, youth and hope and fearlessness and a wild, hungry seeking.”
― Dorothy Parker, Constant Reader: The New Yorker Columns 1927–28

“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. I don’t amount to the powder to blow me to hell. I’ve turned out to be nothing but a bit of flotsam.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“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, The Collected Dorothy Parker

“I've seen the way he dances; it looks like something you do on Saint Walpurgis Night.”
― Dorothy Parker

“De Profundis

Oh, is it, then, Utopian
To hope that I may meet a man
Who'll not relate, in accents suave,
The tales of girls he used to have?”
― Dorothy Parker, The Best of Dorothy Parker

“She felt a cozy solidarity with the big company of the voluntary dead.”
― 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, Complete Stories

“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, Complete Stories

“Well, well. Isn't it a small world? And a peach of a world, too. A true little corker.”
― Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker: Selected Stories

“People ought to be one of two things, young or old. No ; what's the good of fooling? People ought to be one of two things, young or dead.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Mrs. Parker had a rooted aversion to [A. A.] Milne in all his pastel moods and a little history to go with it. In 1928 she had been required—in her capacity as ‘Constant Reader’—to review his latest offering, a book called The House at Pooh Corner, in which Piglet asks Pooh why he has added the phrase ‘Tiddely-pom’ to a song, and Pooh answers, ‘To make it more hummy.’

‘And it is that word “hummy,” my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weeder frowed up’” (25).”
― Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker: In Her Own Words

“The dinner itself might well have been planned by the same mind that had devised the décor: black bean soup, crab meat and slivers of crab shell done in cream, roasted crown of lamb with bone tips decently encased in little paper drawers, tiny hard potatoes, green peas ruined by chopped carrots, asparagus instead of salad, and the dessert called, perhaps a shade hysterically, Cherries Jubilee.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“Non sono mai stata milionaria, ma so che sarei brava a esserlo.”
― Dorothy Parker

“In my youth, it was a way I had,
To do my best to please.
And change, with every passing lad
To suit his theories.

But now I know the things I know
And do the things I do,
And if you do not like me so,
To hell, my love, with you.”
― Dorothy Parker

“The second act, indeed, might have been used to good advantage to start the play off with, and all the words that preceded it could have been saved for future use. Thriftily managed, they would have served the author for the next three years.”
― Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918–1923

“In youth, it was a way I had,
To do my best to please.
And change, with every passing lad
To suit his theories.

But now I know the things I know
And do the things I do,
And if you do not like me so,
To hell, my love, with you.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Complete Poems of Dorothy Parker”
― Dorothy Parker, The Collected Dorothy Parker

“The trajectory of Parker’s critical acceptance has often been charted far below that of her popular acclaim, a curious reversal of the situation of many other mid-twentieth-century writers, who are so often pushed to the front of the group by their very own personal critics, the authors looking a great deal like reluctant children, aware of their limitations, who are shoved onto the stage by aggressively solicitous parents eager for them to perform so that their own talents can be validated.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“El aburrimiento se cura con curiosidad. La curiosidad no se cura con nada.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Dorothy Parker wrote strong prose for most of her life, and she wrote a lot of it, remaining relentlessly compassionate regarding, and interested in, the sufferings primarily of those who could not extricate themselves from the emotional tortures of unsuccessful personal relationships.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“I hate writing. I love having written!”
― Dorothy Parker

“INVENTORY

Four be the things I am wiser to know:
Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.

Four be the things I’d been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.

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

Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.”
― Dorothy Parker, Enough Rope