Top 40 Jean Kerr Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it’s just possible you haven’t grasped the situation.”

— Jean Kerr

2. “I think success has no rules, but you can learn a great deal from failure.”

— Jean Kerr

3. “Hope is the feeling that the feeling you have isn’t permanent.”

— Jean Kerr

4. “The only reason that they say, ‘Women and children first’ is to test the strength of the lifeboats.”

— Jean Kerr

5. “Some people have such a talent for making the best of a bad situation that they go around creating bad situations so they can make the best of them.”

— Jean Kerr

6. “Being divorced is like being hit by a Mack truck. If you live through it, you start looking very carefully to the right and to the left.”

— Jean Kerr

7. “The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible.”

— Jean Kerr

8. “Children are different mentally, physically, spiritually, quantitatively, qualitatively; and furthermore, they’re all a little bit nuts.”

— Jean Kerr

9. “The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old.”

— Jean Kerr

10. “Do you know how helpless you feel if you have a full cup of coffee in your hand and you start to sneeze?”

— Jean Kerr

11. “I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being skin deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?”

— Jean Kerr

12. “You don’t seem to realize that a poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help.”

— Jean Kerr

13. “People only call you ‘my dear’ when they are irritated with you.”

— Jean Kerr

14. “Don’t be silly. I’m a mature, intelligent woman. Of course I’m afraid of my mother.”

— Jean Kerr

15. “Marrying a man is like buying something you’ve been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn’t always go with everything else in the house.”

— Jean Kerr

16. “Dearer to me than the evening star A Packard car A Hershey bar Or a bride in her rich adorning Dearer than any of these by far Is to lie in bed in the morning.”

— Jean Kerr

17. “While in some quarters it is felt that the critic is just a necessary evil, most serious-minded, decent, talented theater people agree that the critic is an unnecessary evil.”

— Jean Kerr

18. “I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me that they are wonderful things for other people to go on.”

— Jean Kerr

19. “One of the most difficult things to contend with in a hospital is that assumption on the part of the staff that because you have lost your gall bladder you have also lost your mind.”

— Jean Kerr

20. “I have noticed that in plays where the characters on stage laugh a great deal, the people out front laugh very little.”

— Jean Kerr

21. “I will read anything rather than work.”

— Jean Kerr

22. “Being on a ship is something like being pregnant. You can sit there and do absolutely nothing but stare at the water and have the nicest sense that you are accomplishing something.”

— Jean Kerr

23. “I make mistakes; I’ll be the second to admit it.”

— Jean Kerr

24. “I once truly believed that if I had to stand in line for twenty minutes to have a package gift-wrapped it actually gave the recipient more pleasure.”

— Jean Kerr

25. “Man is the only animal that learns by being hypocritical. He pretends to be polite and then, eventually, he becomes polite.”

— Jean Kerr

26. “I was always the last woman on the last down elevator as the store was closing.”

— Jean Kerr

27. “I’m not so sure it’s so civilized to be civilized all the time.”

— Jean Kerr

28. “There is this to be said about having money. You get rejected by a higher class of people.”

— Jean Kerr

29. “Women speak because they wish to speak, whereas a man speaks only when driven to speak by something outside himself like, for instance, he can’t find any clean socks.”

— Jean Kerr

30. “I know all about improvisation and the free-form that mirrors the chaos of our time, but I do like to feel that the playwright has done some work before I got there.”

— Jean Kerr

31. “A lawyer is never entirely comfortable with a friendly divorce, anymore than a good mortician wants to finish his job and then have the patient sit up on the table.”

— Jean Kerr

32. “Even though a number of people have tried, no one has yet found a way to drink for a living.”

— Jean Kerr

33. “I don’t want to see the uncut version of anything.”

— Jean Kerr

34. “If you have formed the habit of checking on every new diet that comes along, you will find that, mercifully, they all blur together, leaving you with only one definite piece of information: french-fried potatoes are out.”

— Jean Kerr

35. “When the grandmothers of today hear the word ‘Chippendales,’ they don’t necessarily think of chairs.”

— Jean Kerr

36. “I know what I wish Ralph Nader would investigate next. Marriage. It’s not safe, it’s not safe at all.”

— Jean Kerr

37. “Now the thing about having a baby – and I can’t be the first person to have noticed this – is that thereafter you have it.”

— Jean Kerr

38. “Some enterprising youth should go from door to door on Christmas morning peddling batteries.”

— Jean Kerr

39. “Oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful if some manufacturer would make a toy as tough, as staunch, as hard to crack open as the carton it comes in!”

— Jean Kerr

40. “It takes at least one to make a marriage.”

— Jean Kerr

41. “To me having a party is something like having a baby. The fact that you got through the last one alive is not somehow sufficiently reassuring now.”

— Jean Kerr

42. “Years ago when a man began to notice that if he stood up on the subway he was immediately replaced by two people, he figured he was getting too fat.”

— Jean Kerr

43. “An actor can remember his briefest notice well into senescence and long after he has forgotten his phone number and where he lives.”

— Jean Kerr

44. “I don’t grasp things this early in the day. I mean, I hear voices, all right, but I can’t pick out the verbs.”

— Jean Kerr

45. “Movie actors are just ordinary, mixed-up people – with agents.”

— Jean Kerr

46. “In the beginning, we made the usual mistake of looking at houses we could afford. I am working on a proposition, hereafter to be known as Kerr’s law, which states in essence: All the houses you can afford to buy are depressing.”

— Jean Kerr