Dorothy Parker

“God's acre was her garden-spot, she said;She sat there often, of the Summer days,Little and slim and sweet, among the dead,Her hair a fable in the leveled rays.”

“Coda"There's little in taking or giving,There's little in water or wine;This living, this living, this livingWas never a project of mine.Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse isThe gain of the one at the top,For art is a form of catharsis,And love is a permanent flop,And work is the province of cattle,And rest's for a clam in a shell,So I'm thinking of throwing the battle-Would you kindly direct me to hell?”

“I think that I shall never knowWhy I am thus, and I am so.Around me, other girls inspireIn men the rush and roar of fire,The sweet transparency of glass,The tenderness of April grass,The durability of granite;But me- I don't know how to plan it.The lads I've met in Cupid's deadlockWere- shall we say?- born out of wedlock.They broke my heart, they stilled my song,And said they had to run along,Explaining, so to sop my tears,First came their parents or careers.But ever does experienceDeny me wisdom, calm, and sense!Though she's a fool who seeks to captureThe twenty-first fine, careless rapture,I must go on, till ends my rope,Who from my birth was cursed with hope.A heart in half is chaste, archaic;But mine resembles a mosaic-The thing's become ridiculous!Why am I so? Why am I thus?”

“Once, when I was young and true.Someone left me sad -Broke my brittle heart in two;And that is very bad.Love is for unlucky folk,Love is but a curse.Once there was a heart I broke;And that, I think, is worse.”

“Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, 'You're all a lost generation.' That got around to certain people and we all said, 'Whee! We're lost.”

“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.”

“Bewildered is the fox who lives to find that grapes beyond reach can be really sour.”

“‎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.”

“I've never been a millionaire but I know I'd be just darling at it.”

“Emily Post's Etiquette is out again, this time in a new and an enlarged edition, and so the question of what to do with my evenings has been all fixed up for me.”

“Friends come and go but I wouldn't have thought you'd be one of them”

“Je ne peux être juste pour les livres qui traitent de la femme en tant que femme... Mon idée c'est que tous, aussi bien hommes que femmes, qui que nous sayons, nous devons être considérés comme d'êtres humaines.”

“...It's not that she has not tried to improve her condition before acknowledging its hopelessness. (Oh, come on, let's get the hell out of this, and get into the first person.) I have sought, by study, to better my form and make myself Society's Darling. You see, 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 about a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen, but I thought that maybe I might be the girl to start the vogue. I would become brilliant. I would sparkle. I would hold whole dinner tables spellbound. I would have throngs fighting to come within hearing distance of me while the weakest, elbowed mercilessly to the outskirts, would cry "What did she say?" or "Oh, please ask her to tell it again." That's what I would do. Oh I could just hear myself."-Review of the books, Favorite Jokes of Famous People, by Bruce Barton; The Technique of the Love Affair by "A Gentlewoman." (Actually by Doris Langley Moore.) Review title: Wallflower's Lament; November 17, 1928.”

“..."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”

“...I have read but little of Madame Glyn. I did not know that things like "It" were going on. I have misspent my days. When I think of all those hours I flung away in reading William James and Santayana, when I might have been reading of life, throbbing, beating, perfumed life, I practically break down. Where, I ask you, have I been, that no true word of Madame Glyn's literary feats has come to me?But even those far, far better informed than I must work a bit over the opening sentence of Madame Glyn's foreword to her novel" "This is not," the says, drawing her emeralds warmly about her, "the story of the moving picture entitled It, but a full character study of the story It, which the people in the picture read and discuss." I could go mad, in a nice way, straining to figure that out....Well it turns out that Ava and John meet, and he begins promptly to "vibrate with passion." ......It goes on for nearly three hundred pages, with both of them vibrating away like steam launches."-Review of the book, It, by Elinor Glyn. Review title: Madame Glyn Lectures on "It," with Illustrations; November 26, 1927.”

“To me, the raveled sleeve of care is never more painlessly knitted up than in an evening alone in a chair snug yet copious, with a good light and an easily held little volume sloppily printed and bound in inexpensive paper. I do not ask much of it - which is just as well, for that is all I get. It does not matter if I guess the killer, and if I happen to discover, along around page 208, that I have read the work before, I attribute the fact not to the less than arresting powers of the author, but to my own lazy memory. I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours. In all reverence I say Heaven bless the Whodunit, the soothing balm on the wound, the cooling hand on the brow, the opiate of the people."--Book review Of Ellery Queen: The New York Murders, from Esquire, January 1959”

“London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it.”

“You were perfectly fine.”

“I don't know," she said. "We used to squabble a lot when we were going together and then engaged and everything, but I thought everything would be so different as soon as you were married. And now I feel so sort of strange and everything. I feel so sort of alone.”

“Never complain, never explain.”

“Amo i Martini, ma due al massimo. Tre, e sono sotto al tavolo. Quattro, e sono sotto il cameriere.”

“Travel, trouble, music, art, a kiss, a frock, a rhyme --I never said they feed my heart, but still they pass my time.”

“I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem.”

“The TriflerDeath's the lover that I'd be taking;Wild and fickle and fierce is he.Small's his care if my heart be breaking-Gay young Death would have none of me.Hear them clack of my haste to greet him!No one other my mouth had kissed.I had dressed me in silk to meet him-False young Death would not hold the tryst.Slow's the blood that was quick and stormy,Smooth and cold is the bridal bed;I must wait till he whistles for me-Proud young Death would not turn his head.I must wait till my breast is wilted.I must wait till my back is bowed,I must rock in the corner, jilted-Death went galloping down the road.Gone's my heart with a trifling rover.Fine he was in the game he played-Kissed, and promised, and threw me over,And rode away with a prettier maid.”

“If I should labor through daylight and dark,Consecrate, valorous, serious, true,Then on the world I may blazon my mark;And what if I don't, and what if I do?”

“Living well is the best revenge.”

“Why, that dog is practically a Phi Beta Kappa. She can sit up and beg, and she can give her paw -- I don't say she will but she can.”

“There's little in taking or givingThere's little in water or wineThis living, this living , this livingwas never a project of mine.Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse isthe gain of the one at the topfor art is a form of catharsisand love is a permanent flopand work is the province of cattleand rest's for a clam in a shellso I'm thinking of throwing the battlewould you kindly direct me to hell?”

“Hold your pen and spare your voice.”

“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.”

“God, the bitter misery that reading works into this world! Everybody knows that - everbody who IS everybody. All the best minds have been off reading for years. Look at the swing La Rouchefoucauld took at it. He said that if nobody had ever learned to read, very few people would be in love. Good for you, La Rouchefoucauld; nice going, boy. I wish I’d never learned to read.”

“Then she told herself to stop her nonsense. If you looked for things to make you feel hurt and wretched and unnecessary, you were certain to find them, more easily each time, so easily, soon, that you did not even realize you had gone out searching. Women alone often developed into experts at the practice. She must never join their dismal league.”

“Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat.”

“Now to me, Edith looks like something that would eat her young.”

“I can’t write five words but that I change seven.”

“Penelope In the pathway of the sun, In the footsteps of the breeze,Where the world and sky are one, He shall ride the silver seas, He shall cut the glittering wave.I shall sit at home, and rock;Rise, to heed a neighbor's knock;Brew my tea, and snip my thread;Bleach the linen for my bed. They will call him brave.”

“Trapped like a trap in a trap”

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

“I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.”

“Women and elephants never forget.”

“Tell him I was too fucking busy-- or vice versa.”

“The Swiss are a neat and an industrious people, none of whom is under seventy-five years of age.”

“It turns out that, at social gatherings, as a source of entertainment, conviviality, and good fun, I rank somewhere between a sprig of parsley and a single ice-skate.”

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

“I wish, I wish I were a poisonous bacterium.”

“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.”

“I know that an author must be brave enough to chop away clinging tentacles of good taste for the sake of a great work. But this is no great work, you see.”

“I find her anecdotes more efficacious than sheep-counting, rain on a tin roof, or alanol tablets.... you will find me and Morpheus, off in a corner, necking.”

“I regret to say that during the first act of this, I fell so soundly asleep that the gentleman who brought me piled up a barricade of overcoat, hat, stick, and gloves between us to establish a separation in the eyes of the world, and went into an impersonation of A Young Man Who Has Come to the Theater Unaccompanied.”

“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.”