Dorothy Parker Quotes - Page 9

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

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

Hollywood is the one place on earth where you could die of encouragement.

[From a window in the Writer's Building at MGM, which overlooked a cemetery:] Hello down there. It might interest you to know that up here we are just as dead as you are.

Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn, the word "sophisticate" means, very simply, "obscene." A sophisticatedstory is a dirty story. Some of that meaning was wafted eastward and got itself mixed up into the present definition. So that a "sophisticate" means: one who dwells in a tower made of a DuPont substitute for ivory and holds a glass of flat champagne in one hand and an album of dirty post cards in the other.

London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful.

How do people go to sleep? I'm afraid I've lost the knack. I might try busting myself smartly over the temple with the night-light. I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things.

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

It is that word 'hunny,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Because your eyes are slant and slow, Because your hair is sweet to touch, My heart is high again; but oh, I doubt if this will get me much.

I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen." [From a column dated November 17, 1928]

Eternity is a ham and two people.

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

This must be a gift book. That is to say a book, which you wouldn't take on any other terms.

Accursed from their birth they be Who seek to find monogamy, Pursuing it from bed to bed— I think they would be better dead.

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.

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song

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

If I don't drive around the park, I'm pretty sure to make my mark. If I'm in bed each night by ten, I may get back my looks again. If I abstain from fun and such, I'll probably amount to much; But I shall stay the way I am, Because I do not give a damn.

Go to the Martin Beck Theatre and watch Katherine Hepburn run the gamut of emotions from A to B.

Into love and out again, Thus I went and thus I go. Spare your voice, and hold your pen: Well and bitterly I know All the songs were ever sung, All the words were ever said; Could it be, when I was young, Someone dropped me on my head?

Somebody was using the pencil.

Guido Natso is natso guido.

The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. The boys have gone hog-wild with liberty, yet the short flat terms used over and over, both in dialogue and narrative, add neither vigor nor clarity; the effect is not of shock but of something far more dangerous — tedium.