Home > Author > Dorothy Parker
81 " The House Beautiful is, for me, the play lousy. "
― Dorothy Parker
82 " [On Oscar Wilde:]"If, with the literate, I amImpelled to try an epigram,I never seek to take the credit;We all assume that Oscar said it.[Life Magazine, June 2, 1927] "
83 " So, you're the man who can't spell 'fuck.'" Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer after publishers had convinced Mailer to replace the word with a euphemism, 'fug,' in his 1948 book, "The Naked and the Dead. "
84 " Ah, clear they see and true they sayThat one shall weep, and one shall stray "
85 " Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves. "
86 " All I have to be thankful for in this world is that I was sitting down when my garter busted. "
― Dorothy Parker , The Portable Dorothy Parker
87 " I never see that prettiest thing-A cherry bough gone white with Spring-But what I think, "How gay 'twould beTo hang me from a flowering tree. "
― Dorothy Parker , Not So Deep As A Well: Collected Poems
88 " ANECDOTESo silent I when love was by He yawned, and turned away;But sorrow clings to my apron-strings, I have so much to say. "
89 " ..."Hence," goes on the professor, "definitions of happiness are interesting." I suppose the best thing to do with that is to let is pass. Me, I never saw a definition of happiness that could detain me after train-time, but that may be a matter of lack of opportunity, of inattention, or of congenital rough luck. If definitions of happiness can keep Professor Phelps on his toes, that is little short of dandy. We might just as well get on along to the next statement, which goes like this: "One of the best" (we are still on definitions of happiness) "was given in my Senior year at college by Professor Timothy Dwight: 'The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts.'" Promptly one starts recalling such Happiness Boys as Nietzche, Socrates, de Maupassant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, and Poe."-Review of the book, Happiness, by (Professor) William Lyon Phelps. Review title: The Professor Goes in for Sweetness and Light; November 5, 1927 "
― Dorothy Parker , Constant Reader
90 " The lads I've met in cupid's deadlockWere - shall we say? - born out of wedlock "
91 " De ProfundisOh, is it, then, UtopianTo hope that I may meet a manWho'll not relate, in accents suave,The tales of girls he used to have? "
― Dorothy Parker , The Best of Dorothy Parker
92 " He and I had an office so tiny, that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery. "
93 " Anyway, maybe it's only somebody that just died and left you twenty million dollars. Maybe it isn't some other woman at all. "
― Dorothy Parker , Here Lies: The Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker
94 " You don’t want a general houseworker, do you? Or a traveling companion, quiet, refined, speaks fluent French entirely in the present tense? Or an assistant billiard-maker? Or a private librarian? Or a lady car-washer? Because if you do, I should appreciate your giving me a trial at the job. Any minute now, I am going to become one of the Great Unemployed. I am about to leave literature flat on its face. I don’t want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading. "
95 " Oh, anywhere, driver, anywhere - it doesn't matter. Just keep driving.It's better here in this taxi than it was walking. It's no good my trying to walk. There is always a glimpse through the crowd of someone who looks like him—someone with his swing of the shoulders, his slant of the hat. And I think it's he, I think he's come back. And my heart goes to scalding water and the buildings sway and bend above me. No, it's better to be here. But I wish the driver would go fast, so fast that people walking by would be a long gray blur, and I could see no swinging shoulders, no slanted hat.Dorothy Parker, Sentiment, Harper's Bazaar, May 1933. "
― Dorothy Parker , Complete Stories
96 " To keep something, you must take care of it. More, you must understand just what sort of care it requires. You must know the rules and abide by them. She could do that. She had been doing it all the months, in the writing of her letters to him. There had been rules to be learned in that matter, and the first of them was the hardest: never say to him what you want him to say to you. Never tell him how sadly you miss him, how it grows no better, how each day without him is sharper than the day before. Set down for him the gay happenings about you, bright little anecdotes, not invented, necessarily, but attractively embellished. Do not bedevil him with the pinings of your faithful heart because he is your husband, your man, your love. For you are writing to none of these. You are writing to a soldier. "
97 " Well, well. Isn't it a small world? And a peach of a world, too. A true little corker. "
― Dorothy Parker , Dorothy Parker: Selected Stories
98 " La cura para el aburrimiento es la curiosidad. Para la curiosidad no existe cura. "
99 " This isn’t my head I’ve got on now. I think this is something that used to belong to Walt Whitman. "
100 " 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. "
― Dorothy Parker , The Complete Poems of Dorothy Parker