Top 316 Quotes & Sayings by Dorothy Parker - Page 2

[On hearing that President Coolidge was dead:] How can you tell?

Quick!! Act as if nothing has happened!

Los Angeles: Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.

I was the toast of two continents: Greenland and Australia.

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.

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

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.

It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes.

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

Little Words When you are gone, there is nor bloom nor leaf, Nor singing sea at night, nor silver birds; And I can only stare, and shape my grief In little words. I cannot conjure loveliness, to drown The bitter woe that racks my cords apart. The weary pen that sets my sorrow down Feeds at my heart. There is no mercy in the shifting year, No beauty wraps me tenderly about. I turn to little words- so you, my dear, Can spell them out.

The only useful thing I ever learned in school was that if you spit on your eraser it erased ink.

Now, look, baby, 'Union' is spelled with 5 letters. It is not a four-letter word.

A girl's best friend is her mutter.

Bewildered is the fox who lives to find that grapes beyond reach can be really sour.

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

The only “ism” Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.

ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.

I regret to say that during the first act of this, I fell so soundly asleep that the gentleman who brought me piled up a barricade of overcoat, hat, stick, and gloves between us to establish a separation in the eyes of the world, and went into an impersonation of A Young Man Who Has Come to the Theater Unaccompanied.

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!

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.

(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.

Newton's Fourth Law: Every action has an equal and opposite satisfaction.

I don't want to be classed as a humorist. It makes me feel guilty. I've never read a good tough quotable female humorist, and I never was one myself. I couldn't do it. A "smartcracker" they called me, and that makes me sick and unhappy. There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

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

They sicken of the calm who know the storm.

Daily dawns another day; I must up, to make my way. Though I dress and drink and eat, Move my fingers and my feet, Learn a little, here and there, Weep and laugh and sweat and swear, Hear a song, or watch a stage, Leave some words upon a page, Claim a foe, or hail a friend- Bed awaits me at the end.

What ever beauty may be it has for its basis order and for its essence unity Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.

Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.

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.

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.

The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.

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?

Friends come and go but I wouldn't have thought you'd be one of them

The definition of eternity is two people and a ham.

[On hearing that Clare Boothe Luce was invariably kind to her inferiors:] And where does she find them?

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.

And I'll stay off Verlaine too; he was always chasing Rimbauds.

All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.

My own dear love, he is strong and bold And he cares not what comes after. His words ring sweet as a chime of gold, And his eyes are lit with laughter. He is jubilant as a flag unfurled - Oh, a girl, she'd not forget him. My own dear love, he is all my world - And I wish I'd never met him.

And if my heart be scarred and burned, The safer, I, for all I learned.

Constant use had not worn ragged the fabric of their friendship.

Where unwilling dies the rose; buds the new another year.

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

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

Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, can be prolonged to the point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.

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

Should they whisper false of you, Never trouble to deny; Should the words they say be true, Weep and storm and say they lie.

Drink and dance and laugh and lie, Love, the reeling midnight through, For tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

The cleverest woman on earth is the biggest fool on earth with a man.

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?

If all the girls attending [the Yale prom] were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised.

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.

A liberal is a man who leaves the room before the fight starts.

There is entirely too much charm around, and something must be done to stop it.

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.

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

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.

His voice was as intimate as the rustle of sheets.

Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.