Quotes from The Poetry and Short Stories of Dorothy Parker (Modern Library)

Dorothy Parker ·  457 pages

Rating: (1.2K votes)


“Lips that taste of tears, they say,
Are the best for kissing.”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Poetry and Short Stories of Dorothy Parker (Modern Library)


“Oh, it's so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Poetry and Short Stories of Dorothy Parker (Modern Library)


“When asked by her publisher why her work had not been submitted while on her honeymoon: "I've been too fucking busy or vice versa”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Poetry and Short Stories of Dorothy Parker (Modern Library)


“Every love's the love before
In a duller dress.”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Poetry and Short Stories of Dorothy Parker (Modern Library)


About the author

Dorothy Parker
Born place: in Long Branch, New Jersey, The United States
Born date August 22, 1893
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Popular quotes

“I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be linked unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.
The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. 'You're completely crazy,' he said.
Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, thought mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.
Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.
The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.
The wilful filling off a gear teeth, the wilful doing without certain obvious pieces of information -
That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony -
That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love fora a blue vase -
That was how Rudolf Hess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers -
That was how Nazi Germany sense no important difference between civilization and hydrophobia -
That is the closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Mother Night


“There’s a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality—there’s mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from A Dirty Job


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“It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.”
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“The shadow pulled away, moving forward quickly. My first instinct screamed Arum and to push away from it. I reached blindly for the obsidian necklace, realizing too late I didn’t have it anymore.

“You’re still having nightmares,” the shadow said.

At the sound of the familiar voice, fear gave way to rage so potent that it tasted like a battery acid. I was on my feet before I knew it.

“Blake,” I spat.”
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