Top 316 Quotes & Sayings by Dorothy Parker - Page 4

Some men break your heart in two, Some men fawn and flatter, Some men never look at you; And that cleans up the matter.

It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven.

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.

Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.

Hell's afloat in lover's tears.

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?

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?

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.

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 :)

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

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

[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.

It is that word 'hunny,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

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.

Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn.

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.

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song

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

Trapped like a trap in a trap

[On being told their loquacious, domineering host was 'outspoken':] By whom?

Love is like quicksilver in the hand.

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

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.

She can sit up and beg, and she can give her paw — I don't say she will, but she can.

How do people go to sleep? I'm afraid I've lost the knack. I might try busting myself smartly over the temple with the night-light. 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.

[On Dashiell Hammett:] ... he is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn.

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

Her big heart did not, as is so sadly often the case, inhabit a big bosom.

All I have to be thankful for in this world is that I was sitting down when my garter busted.

I wouldn't touch a superlative again with an umbrella.

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.

Guido Natso is natso guido.

She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.

Men They hail you as their morning star Because you are the way you are. If you return the sentiment, They'll try to make you different; And once they have you, safe and sound, They want to change you all around. Your moods and ways they put a curse on; They'd make of you another person. They cannot let you go your gait; They influence and educate. They'd alter all that they admired. They make me sick, they make me tired.

Accursed from their birth they be Who seek to find monogamy, Pursuing it from bed to bed— I think they would be better dead.

Scratch a king and find a fool!

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.

It's easier to write about those you hate — just as it's easier to criticize a bad play or a bad book.

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.

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

Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

The House Beautiful is the play lousy.

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

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

Age before beauty, and pearls before swine.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Scratch a lover, and find a foe.

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

This must be a gift book. That is to say a book, which you wouldn't take on any other terms.

They say of me, and so they should, It's doubtful if I come to good.

Hollywood is the one place on earth where you could die of encouragement.

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

Scratch an actor and you'll find an actress.

The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. The boys have gone hog-wild with liberty, yet the short flat terms used over and over, both in dialogue and narrative, add neither vigor nor clarity; the effect is not of shock but of something far more dangerous — tedium.

[Completely bored by a country weekend, wiring to a friend:] For heaven's sake, rush me a loaf of bread, enclosing saw and file.