Top 250 Dorothy Parker Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “We were all imitative. We all wandered in after Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay. We were all being dashing and gallant, declaring we weren’t virgins, whether we were or not.”

— Dorothy Parker

202. “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.”

— Dorothy Parker

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

— Dorothy Parker

204. “I’m never going to accomplish anything; that’s perfectly clear to me. I’m never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don’t do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don’t even do that any more.”

— Dorothy Parker

205. “They say of me, and so they should, It’s doubtful if I come to good.”

— Dorothy Parker

206. “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

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

— Dorothy Parker

208. “All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn’t sit in the same room with me.”

— Dorothy Parker

209. “And when it ends, only those places where you have known sorrow are kindly to you. If you revisit the scenes of your happiness, your heart must burst of its agony. And.”

— Dorothy Parker

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

— Dorothy Parker

211. “He is a writer for the ages, the ages of four to eight.”

— Dorothy Parker

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

— Dorothy Parker

213. “Honest, I won’t ever do it again. I’ll go straight, after this. I’ll never go to bed again, if I can only sleep now.”

— Dorothy Parker

214. “The plot is so tired that even this reviewer, who in infancy was let drop by a nurse with the result that she has ever since been mystified by amateur coin tricks, was able to guess the identity of the murderer from the middle of the book.”

— Dorothy Parker

215. “The writer’s way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say, cleaning out ferryboats?”

— Dorothy Parker

216. “Said after she had been seriously ill: The doctors were very brave about it.”

— Dorothy Parker

217. “It was written without fear and without research.”

— Dorothy Parker

218. “She dreamed by day of never again putting on tight shoes, of never having to laugh and listen and admire, of never more being a good sport. Never.”

— Dorothy Parker

219. “Of Orson Welles: It’s like meeting God without dying.”

— Dorothy Parker

220. “The ones I like are ‘cheque’ and ‘enclosed.’”

— Dorothy Parker

221. “I’ll be the way I was when I first met him. Then maybe he’ll like me again. I was always sweet, at first. Oh, it’s so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.”

— Dorothy Parker

222. “Please don’t let me hope, dear God. Please don’t. I.”

— Dorothy Parker

223. “The only “ism” Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.”

— Dorothy Parker

224. “I’m of the glamorous ladies At whose beckoning history shook. But you are a man, and see only my pan, So I stay at home with a book.”

— Dorothy Parker

225. “It’s easier to write about those you hate – just as it’s easier to criticize a bad play or a bad book.”

— Dorothy Parker

226. “His books are exciting and powerful and – if I may filch the word from the booksy ones – pulsing.”

— Dorothy Parker

227. “And I’ll stay off Verlaine too; he was always chasing Rimbauds.”

— Dorothy Parker

228. “Authors and actors and artists and such – Never know nothing, and never know much.”

— Dorothy Parker

229. “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.”

— Dorothy Parker

230. “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.”

— Dorothy Parker

231. “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.”

— Dorothy Parker

232. “Like many a better one before me, I have gone down under the force of numbers, under the books and books and books that keep coming out and coming out and coming out, shoals of them, spates of them, flash floods of them, too blame many books, and no sign of an end.”

— Dorothy Parker

233. “There was always something immensely comic to her in the thought of living elsewhere than New York. She could not regard as serious proposals that she share a western residence.”

— Dorothy Parker

234. “I don’t want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.”

— Dorothy Parker

235. “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.”

— Dorothy Parker

236. “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.”

— Dorothy Parker

237. “Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn...”

— Dorothy Parker

238. “I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn, but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.”

— Dorothy Parker

239. “You do what you can, and you do it because you should. But all you can do is all you can do.”

— Dorothy Parker

240. “Ah, clear they see and true they say That one shall weep, and one shall stray.”

— Dorothy Parker

241. “There are times when images blow to fluff, and comparisons stiffen and shrivel.”

— Dorothy Parker

242. “Mrs. Ewing was a short woman who accepted the obligation borne by so many short women to make up in vivacity what they lack in number of inches from the ground.”

— Dorothy Parker

243. “Why, after all, should readers never be harrowed? Surely there is enough happiness in life without having to go to books for it.”

— Dorothy Parker

244. “And where does she find them?”

— Dorothy Parker

245. “When your bank account is so overdrawn that it is positively photographic, steps must be taken.”

— Dorothy Parker

246. “There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it.”

— Dorothy Parker

247. “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.”

— Dorothy Parker

248. “There was a reason for the cost of those perfectly plain black dresses.”

— Dorothy Parker

249. “Oh, it’s so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.”

— Dorothy Parker

250. “I’ve finally gotten to the bottom of things.”

— Dorothy Parker