Top 60 Mary-Louise Parker Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s good to feel stupid sometimes and do things that are out of your comfort zone.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

2. “One person’s crazy is another person’s refreshing.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

3. “The first thing I ever bought for myself was a green Lacoste shirt.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

4. “People have a problem with me being different, but that propels me forward in life.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

5. “My parents have been together for 65 years. They’re both really stubborn. They’re not quitters.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

6. “Mediocrity is underrated.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

7. “Unless you got a really good reason, you should be nice.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

8. “Words are really powerful. I don’t believe that axiom at all – words can absolutely hurt you. Words can wound. They can do a lot of damage. I think they can do way more damage than sticks and stones. I’ll take sticks and stones.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

9. “Look, I don’t care if anyone likes me when it comes to my work. But I can be massively insecure in other parts of my life.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

10. “I like to pretend that I’m a tough guy. It’s kind of an admission of defeat if I have to ask for help – or even kindness. But if it doesn’t come, at some point I snap and demand it.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

11. “It’s the best part of the whole movie. John Malkovich with a pink pig is – you can’t get better than that. Then John Malkovich alone and then you add a pink pig.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

12. “I enjoy cooking and baking. Alicia Silverstone’s vegan cookbook is awesome.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

13. “We all miss you something fierce, those of us who wouldn’t exist had you not kept walking when an ordinary person would have fallen to their knees. To convey in any existing language how I miss you isn’t possible. It would be like blue trying to describe the ocean.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

14. “I don’t think you necessarily have to be part of a traditional nuclear family to be a good mother.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

15. “I don’t really ever think about whether or not I like the characters I’m playing. I’m more into the minutiae of their behaviour or what they’re doing in a certain scene.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

16. “Toronto I’ve worked in so many times so you kind of just know every store, every hotel, every – it’s really close to New York so it’s awesome for my children so if I have to go home for two days it doesn’t take very much time. Except for Air Canada. Air Canada is the worst part.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

17. “You can never really tell, it’s kind of a red herring until you see the project I think. You just know if you like working with someone or not, and he does have a real sweetness about him, I think.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

18. “I don’t put myself out there, so people aren’t necessarily familiar with me or my face.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

19. “In college, my teachers were usually after me for going after comedy too much, leaning too much in that direction.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

20. “My sister’s fish tacos are out of control. I’d give her a restaurant if I were a gazillionaire.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

21. “Faith to you was more clay than mortar, and if you could interpret the gospel, so could I. So should anyone. If God wasn’t mad at you for drinking wine and chain-smoking and being a homosexual, he might forgive me for stealing a kitten and trying to hide it under a blanket in the back of our station wagon. Certainly that God was preferable to others who wouldn’t let you in Heaven if you said bad words or drank Mountain Dew.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

22. “I do love my avocados, which are great for the skin. I eat pretty healthfully.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

23. “Time, that cold bastard, with its nearlys and untils. I think, what a shame. Time should weep for having spent me without you.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

24. “I don’t get tired of hearing that somebody liked my work.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

25. “People ask me, ‘Why are you doing a show on Showtime?’ Because I’ll do anything really, I don’t really care, I’ll do a show on Nickelodeon if I thought it was well written. Actually Nickelodeon’s kind of awesome.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

26. “I don’t often see the movies I’m in; I’m usually disappointed in myself and it only serves to make me self-conscious.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

27. “To convey in any existing language how I miss you isn’t possible. It would be like blue trying to describe the ocean.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

28. “I hear people say, “It happened for a reason,” or “It’s part of God’s plan,” and I wish that made sense to me but it doesn’t.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

29. “My mother is a beauty.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

30. “My way to combat anything is just to walk straight into it with my fists up.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

31. “Well, it’s kind of like that classic sort of trajectory in this kind of movie where there’s conflict and they’re estranged and they kind of grow to love each other but they don’t show it. Then at the end – it’s kind of like that. But I think the characters are more interesting than that.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

32. “I don’t think anyone honestly would hire me, so I don’t think I have to worry but, if it was well written I would do it. I would do anything.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

33. “I said I don’t know how to say no, I only know how to yell it.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

34. “I have a child and I don’t want to be at work all the time when he’s small. I want to spend time with him.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

35. “I never feel more useful than when I’m making my kids a bowl of soup.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

36. “There was no one for you to impress and no one for you to offend. You were right there and I was afraid of how real you were, which made me question my own level of authenticity. I’d take off my clothes on the beach or spill my guts to a girl I’d never met on the bus, thinking I was uncensored and open, but I wasn’t always real if I wanted someone to like me. I gravitated to those who withheld or told me who they thought I was.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

37. “Thank you for giving me your arm and those four hours that I now understand you did not have an endless supply of. It was short but I loved our little trip. We fell in love, but the way you love a view that comes along once or twice in life.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

38. “You were a living reminder of what I always professed to believe, that you never know what happened to someone that day, so try to cut some slack, but being bound by my own ropes I was unable to give you that.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

39. “You mean something untranslatable.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

40. “Enraged is the wrong word, but I felt like I wanted to kick you in the shins and then make you banana bread. I wanted to key your car and take you out for dim sum. It was admiration, passion and that voice of yours all mushing together and disarming me, making me want smash something and kiss someone.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

41. “You are what makes me indomitable and how I know to keep walking when I feel crippled in every conceivable way.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

42. “Don’t have a fall back, because if you do, you’ll fall back.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

43. “I don’t live in Los Angeles and I don’t do a lot of superfluous press.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

44. “I can’t take credit for more than remembering to point to you when I do something right and for continuing to put one foot in front of the other when I lose heart. We.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

45. “I never know why people come up to me. I think a lot of them just get super-excited because they recognize me from TV but they don’t remember where.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

46. “It’s transparent, how willing we are to dismiss the intelligence of someone who rejects us, as though that renders them incapable of sound judgement.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

47. “I have to say, I haven’t really worked with that many people in my career that I haven’t liked, which I think is really rare.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

48. “I really prefer acting in the theater the most. In some ways TV is closer to that because there’s more of a regularity to the schedule. You have to finish an episode by a certain day. Movies can just go on interminably.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

49. “I go far out, maybe in a field somewhere quiet. I think of things I have done in my life that people tell me are good. I remember that I have done good.”

— Mary-Louise Parker

50. “I’m not comfortable with getting a job by being at the right Hollywood party; I’m not a terribly sociable creature.”

— Mary-Louise Parker