Top 250 Dorothy Parker Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “She will never win him, whose words had shown she feared to lose.”

— Dorothy Parker

203. “If I had any decency, I’d be dead. Most of my friends are.”

— Dorothy Parker

204. “Her big heart did not, as is so sadly often the case, inhabit a big bosom.”

— Dorothy Parker

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Dorothy Parker

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

— Dorothy Parker

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

— Dorothy Parker

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

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

— Dorothy Parker

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

— Dorothy Parker

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Dorothy Parker

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

— Dorothy Parker

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

— Dorothy Parker

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

— Dorothy Parker

222. “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

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

— Dorothy Parker

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

— Dorothy Parker

225. “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

226. “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

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

— Dorothy Parker

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

— Dorothy Parker

229. “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

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

— Dorothy Parker

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Dorothy Parker

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

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

— Dorothy Parker

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

— Dorothy Parker

240. “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

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

— Dorothy Parker

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

— Dorothy Parker

243. “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

244. “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

245. “And where does she find them?”

— Dorothy Parker

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

— 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 don’t ask You to make it easy for me – You can’t do that, for all that You could make a world.”

— Dorothy Parker