Quotes By Author: dorothy parker

“Little WordsWhen 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 griefIn little words.I cannot conjure loveliness, to drownThe bitter woe that racks my cords apart.The weary pen that sets my sorrow downFeeds 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.”

“My love runs by like a day in June, And he makes no friends of sorrows. He’ll tread his galloping rigadoon In the pathway of the morrows. He’ll live his days where the sunbeams start, Nor could storm or wind uproot him. My own dear love, he is all my heart, — And I wish somebody’d shoot him.”

“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.”

“You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks.”

“But I give you my word, in the entire book there is nothing that cannot be said aloud in mixed company. And there is, also, nothing that makes you a bit the wiser. I wonder–oh, what will you think of me–if those two statements do not verge upon the synonymous.”

“If all the girls attending [the Yale prom] were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”

“Three be the things I shall never attain: Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.”

“MenThey hail you as their morning starBecause you are the way you are.If you return the sentiment,They’ll try to make you different;And once they have you, safe and sound,They want to change you all around.Your moods and ways they put a curse on;They’d make of you another person.They cannot let you go your gait;They influence and educate.They’d alter all that they admired.They make me sick, they make me tired.”

“That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can’t say ‘No’ in any of them.”

“Brevity is the soul of lingerie.”

“I like to have a martini,Two at the very most.After three I’m under the table,after four I’m under my host.”

“RésuméRazors pain you,Rivers are damp,Acids stain you,And drugs cause cramp.Guns aren’t lawful,Nooses give,Gas smells awful.You might as well live.”

“It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.”

“And if my heart be scarred and burned,The safer, I, for all I learned.”

“I won’t telephone him. I’ll never telephone him again as long as I live. He’ll rot in hell, before I’ll call him up. You don’t have to give me strength, God; I have it myself. If he wanted me, he could get me. He knows where I am. He knows I’m waiting here. He’s so sure of me, so sure. I wonder why they hate you, as soon as they are sure of you.”