Dorothy Parker: 172 quotes28 likes
Famous Dorothy Parker Quotes
Source: "The Flaw in Paganism" in Death and Taxes (1931)
Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918–1923 (2014) https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25758762M/Dorothy_Parker_Complete_Broadway_1918-1923, Chapter 6: 1923
Dorothy Parker Quotes about love
Variant: A Very Short Song
Once, when I was young and true,
Someone left me sad-
Broke my brittle heart in two;
And that is very bad.
Love is for unlucky folk,
Love is but a curse.
Once there was a heart I broke;
And that, I think, is worse.
Source: Enough Rope
Dorothy Parker: Trending quotes
Dorothy Parker Quotes
“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”
Man and the Gospel (1865) by Thomas Guthrie "and you may know how little God thinks of money by observing on what bad and contemptible characters he often bestows it."
“We may see the small Value God has for Riches, by the People he gives them to.” -- Alexander Pope (1727).
Misattributed
Variant: If you want to know what the Lord God thinks of money, just look at those to whom he gives it.
“Too fucking busy, and vice versa.”
Response to an editor pressuring her for overdue work, as quoted in The Unimportance of Being Oscar (1968) by Oscar Levant, p. 89
“I don't know much about being a millionaire, but I'll bet I'd be darling at it.”
Variant: I've never been a millionaire but I know I'd be just darling at it.
Variant of:<br>I wish I could drink like a lady.<br>“Two or three,” at the most.<br>But two, and I’m under the table—<br>And three, I'm under the host. <br class="br">The Harlequin, Volume 2, 1959, University of Virginia (page ? http://books.google.com/books?id=zdFKAAAAYAAJ&q=%22under+the+table%22+%22under+the+host%22) <br class="br">Perhaps attributed due to “One more drink and I'd have been under the host.” (see above). <br class="br">“ Martini Madness: Dorothy Parker didn’t write the famous quatrain about martinis that’s always attributed to her. http://www.slate.com/articles/life/drink/features/2013/martini_madness_tournament/sweet_16/dorothy_parker_martini_poem_why_the_attribution_is_spurious.html”, Troy Patterson, Slate, April 8, 2013 <br class="br">Misattributed <br class="br">Variant: One martini. Two at the most. Three I'm under the table, four I'm under the host! <br class="br">Source: The Collected Dorothy Parker
"If the doorbell rang in her apartment, she would say, 'What fresh hell can this be?' — and it wasn't funny; she meant it." You might as well live: the life and times of Dorothy Parker, John Keats (Simon Schuster, 1970, p124). Often quoted as "What fresh hell is this?" as in the title of the 1987 biography by Marion Meade, "Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?".
Variant: What fresh hell can this be?
Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker
16 August 1925
Source: Enough Rope (1926)
“Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.”
"But the One on the Right" in The New Yorker (1929)
Context: That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.
“You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.”
Parker's answer when asked to use the word horticulture during a game of Can-You-Give-Me-A-Sentence?, as quoted in You Might as well Live by John Keats (1970).
Source: You Might as Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker
“Brevity is the soul of lingerie.”
Caption written for Vogue 1916
Our Mrs Parker (1934)
Source: While Rome Burns
“That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say No in any of them.”
A similar line was later used by Ira Gershwin in "The Saga of Jenny" in Lady in the Dark (1942): "In 27 languages she couldn't say no."
Our Mrs Parker (1934)
Source: While Rome Burns
“And if my heart be scarred and burned,
The safer, I, for all I learned.”
Source: Sunset Gun: Poems
Source: The Complete Poems of Dorothy Parker
“I'm never going to accomplish anything; that's perfectly clear to me.”
"The Little Hours" in Here Lies (1939)
Context: 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.
From a review of the revised edition of “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White published in Esquire, November 1959.
Interview, The Paris Review (Summer 1956)
“It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.”
On her abortion, as quoted in You Might as well Live by John Keats (1970)
Source: You Might as Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker
"The Little Hours" in Here Lies (1939)
Source: Here Lies: The Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker
“You think You're frightening me with Your hell, don't You? You think Your hell is worse than mine.”
Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker
“Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.”
Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker
“If all the girls attending [the Yale prom] were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised.”
Our Mrs Parker (1934)
Source: While Rome Burns
Context: And there was that wholesale libel on a Yale prom. If all the girls attending it were laid end to end, Mrs Parker said, she wouldn't be at all surprised.
“You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.”
Source: Attributed to Parker after her death, by Robert E. Drennan The Algonquin Wits (1968), p. 124. However the same quip appears anonymously fifteen years earlier, in the trade journal Sales Management (Chicago: Dartnell Corp., 1918-75), vol. 70 (Survey of Buying Power, 1953), p. 80: "Marxism never changes. You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks."
