Dorothy Parker citations

Page 3

“Je ne peux être juste pour les livres qui traitent de la femme en tant que femme… Mon idée c'est que tous, aussi bien hommes que femmes, qui que nous sayons, nous devons être considérés comme d'êtres humaines.”

“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?”

“Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Be you wise and never sad,
You will get your lovely lad.
Never serious be, nor true,
And your wish will come to you--
And if that makes you happy, kid,
You'll be the first it ever did.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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