Dorothy Parker Quotes - Page 6

People ought to be one of two things, young or dead.

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.

Of Orson Welles: It's like meeting God without dying.

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!

Art is a form of catharsis emotional release, purging, cleansing, purifying.

I was the toast of two continents: Greenland and Australia.

Guns aren't lawful; nooses give; gas smells awful. So you might as well live.

There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind...There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it.

All those writers who write about their own childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.

[On hearing that President Coolidge was dead:] How can you tell?

All I say is, nobody has any business to go around looking like a horse and behaving as if it were all right. You don't catch horses going around looking like people, do you?

Little Words When you are gone, there is nor bloom nor leaf, Nor singing sea at night, nor silver birds; And I can only stare, and shape my grief In little words. I cannot conjure loveliness, to drown The bitter woe that racks my cords apart. The weary pen that sets my sorrow down Feeds at my heart. There is no mercy in the shifting year, No beauty wraps me tenderly about. I turn to little words- so you, my dear, Can spell them out.

She was pleased to have him come and never sorry to see him go.

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.

Sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion.

Age before beauty, and pearls before swine.

The ladies men admire, I've heard, Would shudder at a wicked word. Their candle gives a single light, They'd rather stay at home at night. They do not keep awake 'till three, Nor read erotic poetry. They never sanction the impure, Nor recognize an overture. They shrink from powders and from paints... So far I've had no complaints.

ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.

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

A list of authors who have made themselves most beloved and therefore, most comfortable financially, shows that it is our national joy to mistake for the first-rate, the fecund rate.

As I was saying to the landlord only this morning: 'You can't have everything'.

[On an actor who'd broken her leg in London:] Oh, how terrible. She must have done it sliding down a barrister.

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 one day.

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

Pictures pass me in long review,-- Marching columns of dead events. I was tender, and, often, true; Ever a prey to coincidence. Always knew I the consequence; Always saw what the end would be. We're as Nature has made us -- hence I loved them until they loved me.