Dorothy Parker Quotes (139 Quotes)

Gratitude -- the meanest and most snivelling attribute in the world.

Four things I am wiser to know Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.

Summer makes me drowsy, Autumn makes me sing, Winters pretty lousy, but I hate Spring.

I shall stay the way I am because I do not give a damn.

And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

He has a capacity for enjoyment so vast that he gives away great chunks to those about him, and never even misses them. . . . He can take you to a bicycle race and make it raise your hair.

We look like a road company of the Last Supper.

Of Los Angeles Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.

Every year back spring comes, with nasty little birds, yapping their fool heads off.

This play John Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln holds the season's record, thus far, with a run of four evening performances and one matinee. By an odd coincidence, it ran just five performances too many.

Brevity is the soul of lingerie.

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.

On the Yale prom If all the girls attending it were laid end to end I wouldn't be at all surprised.

Hollywood money isn't money. It's congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are.

There is entirely too much charm around, and something must be done to stop it.

Say my love is easy had,
Say I'm bitten raw with pride,
Say I am too often sad-
Still behold me at your side.

For now I am my own again, my friend!

I give her sadness,
And the gift of pain,
The new-moon madness,
And the love of rain.

'House Beautiful' is the play lousy.

The affair between Margot Asquinth and Margot Asquinth will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.

And I shall wear the blue, I think-
They beg to touch its rippled lace;
Or do they love me best in pink,
So sweetly flattering the face?

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

Most good women are hidden treasures who are only safe because nobody looks for them.

Razors pain you Rivers are damp Acids stain you And drugs cause cramp.

Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.

Whose love is given over-well
Shall look on Helen's face in hell,
Whilst those whose love is thin and wise
May view John Knox in Paradise.

Tonight my love is sleeping cold
Where none may see and none shall pass.

Just begin a story with such a phrase as 'I remember Disraeli - poor old Dizz - once saying to me, in answer to my poke in the eye,' and you will find me and Morpheus off in a corner, necking.

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....

I know that there are things that never have been funny, and never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.

Come out, you dogs, and fight!

That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.

He is beyond question a writer of power and his power lies in his ability to make sex so thoroughly, graphically, and aggressively unattractive that one is fairly shaken to ponder how little one has been missing.

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 nightlight.

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.

People hurry and work and swear,
Laugh and grumble and die and wed,
Ponder what they will eat and wear, --
Don't they know that our love is dead?

At age seventy If I had any decency, I'd be dead. Most of my friends are.

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

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

My verses, I cannot say poems. . . . I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.

My life is all like that.

Art is a form of catharsis.

On lady novelists As artists they're rot, but as providers they're oil wells they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter.

Then if my friendships break and bend, There's little need to cry The while I know that every foe Is faithful till I die.

The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'check enclosed.'

They sicken of the calm, who know the storm.

So silent I when Love was by
He yawned, and turned away;
But Sorrow clings to my apron-strings,
I have so much to say.

Of Katharine Hepburn in play 'The Lake,' 1933 She ran the whole gamut of her emotions from A to B.

Sorrow is tranquillity remembered in emotion.

Said after she had been seriously ill The doctors were very brave about it.