Dorothy Parker Quotes
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Dorothy Parker was an American poet, writer, critic, and satirist based in New York; she was best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles.

From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary works published in such magazines as The New Yorker and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed when her involvement in left-wing politics resulted in her being placed on the Hollywood blacklist.

Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker". Nevertheless, both her literary output and reputation for sharp wit have endured. Wikipedia

✵ 22. August 1893 – 7. June 1967 • Other names Dorothy Parkerová

Dorothy Parker photo

Dorothy Parker: 172 quotes28 likes

Dorothy Parker Quotes

“I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem.”

“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 :)”

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

"New York at 6:30 P.M.", Esquire (November 1964)
Context: There is no such hour on the present clock as 6:30, New York time. Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.

“Living well is the best revenge.”

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

Source: Enough Rope

“The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'cheque enclosed.”

“Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
a medley of extemporanea,
And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
and I am Marie of Romania.”

16 August 1925
Source: Enough Rope (1926)

“Where's the man that could ease a heart like a satin gown?”

“Her mind lives tidily, apart from cold and noise and pain. And bolts the door against her heart, out wailing in the rain.”

“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.”

[Magazine, June 2, 1927]
Sunset Gun (1927)

“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.”

Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker

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

Interview, The Paris Review (Summer 1956)
Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker

“Of course I talk to myself. I like a good speaker, and I appreciate an intelligent audience.”

Source: The Ladies of the Corridor

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

Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker

“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!”

“I never see that prettiest thing-
A cherry bough gone white with Spring-
But what I think, "How gay 'twould be
To hang me from a flowering tree.”

Source: Not So Deep As A Well: Collected Poems

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

“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.”

“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.”

Source: Men, Women And Dogs

“The sweeter the apple, the blacker the core. Scratch a lover and find a foe!”

Source: Enough Rope

“The only “ism” Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.”

“Why is it no one sent me yet one perfect limousine, do you suppose? Ah no, it's always just my luck to get one perfect rose.”

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

Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker

“I'll be the way I was when I first met him. Then maybe he'll like me again. I was always sweet, at first. Oh, it's so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.”

Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker

“I wish, I wish I were a poisonous bacterium.”

“Trapped like a trap in a trap”

Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker

“Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.”

New Yorker (4 February 1928)

“Never complain, never explain.”

“Excuse my dust.”

Her proposed epitaph for herself, quoted in Vanity Fair (June 1925)

“Prince or commoner, tenor or bass,
Painter or plumber or never-do-well,
Do me a favor and shut your face -
Poets alone should kiss and tell.”

Source: The Collected Dorothy Parker

“This is me apologizing. I am a fool, a bird-brain, a liar and a horse-thief. I wouldn't touch a superlative again with an umbrella.”

“If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.”

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

“There was a reason for the cost of those perfectly plain black dresses.”

Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker

“Travel, trouble, music, art, a kiss, a frock, a rhyme --
I never said they feed my heart, but still they pass my time.”

Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker

“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 some day."”

First printed in New Yorker, (9 April 1927) p. 31
Sunset Gun (1927)

“Ah, clear they see and true they say
That one shall weep, and one shall stray”

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

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

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

“Hold your pen and spare your voice.”

“Now to me, Edith looks like something that would eat her young.”

Source: The Collected Dorothy Parker

“How do people go to sleep? I'm afraid I've lost the knack.”

“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.”

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