A Quote by Dorothy Parker

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

Dorothy Parker

Quote Topics

Messes Tragedies Us

Quote Author

Dorothy Parker
American - Poet
August 22, 1893 - June 7, 1967

There are tragedies that happen all the time in America, but there are certain types of tragedies that kind of pull us together and make us pause and give us a chance to reflect about where we are, where we're going, and that sort of thing.

Larry Wilmore

The Vietnamese have a secret weapon. It's their willingness to die beyond our willingness to kill. In effect, they've been saying, You can kill us, but you'll have to kill a lot of us; you may have to kill all of us. And, thank heaven, we are not yet ready to do that.

George Wald

Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create ever more dangerous messes. Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism.

Margaret Atwood

Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived...Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation... Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.

Anne Lamott

It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or if the conventional happy ending was impossible, then it must be a tragedy in which one or both should die. In real life very few of us get what we want, our tragedies don't kill us, but we go on living them year after year, carrying them with us like a scar on an old wound.

Willa Cather

Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes. Problems are extracted from messes by analysis. Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes.

Russell L. Ackoff

I'm one of those people who loves love. I'm fascinated by it: what it does to us, how it messes us up.

Eleanor Tomlinson

I remember one of them - it was a 1941 black Ford. As it went by very slow, a guy leaned out with a shotgun, keeping a bead on us all the time, and we just had to walk slowly and wait for him to kill us... They didn't kill us, but they didn't end it, either.

Medgar Evers

We salvage the bones of our lives every day, through small tragedies and big tragedies.

Jesmyn Ward

I hope my daughter knows that in our house we can make messes and have fun and we'll laugh through it. Granted I don't want her to trash the house, but we do make a lot of messes.

Angela Kinsey

Nobody messes with China, nobody messes with the United States, or with Europe, because these are really big entities with a lot of clout and a lot of economic power. They have a place at the table.

Mo Ibrahim

I couldn't kill a chicken, I couldn't kill a cow - I was a vegetarian too at that time - so I thought, well what is there that I could kill? I couldn't kill this and I couldn't kill that.

Ellen Burstyn

To break a Navy Seal, you have to kill us. That's why we can make it into our training. That's why we can call ourselves Seals because the only way your gonna break us is to kill us.