Dorothy Parker: Herring

“You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.”

“There was nothing separate about her days. Like drops on the window-pane, they ran together and trickled away.”

“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?”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“A lady … with all the poise of the Sphinx though but little of her mystery.”

“Dotty had
Great Big
Visions of
Quietude.
Dotty saw an
Ad, and it
Left her
Flat.
Dotty had a
Great Big
Snifter of
Cyanide.
And that (said Dotty)
Is that.”

“Well, Aimee Semple McPherson has written a book. And were you to call it a little peach, you would not be so much as scratching its surface. It is the story of her life, and it is called In the Service of the King, which title is perhaps a bit dangerously suggestive of a romantic novel. It may be that this autobiography is set down in sincerity, frankness and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.”