Quotes from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“I won't telephone him. I'll never telephone him again as long as I live. He'll rot in hell, before I'll call him up. You don't have to give me strength, God; I have it myself. If he wanted me, he could get me. He knows where I am. He knows I'm waiting here. He's so sure of me, so sure. I wonder why they hate you, as soon as they are sure of you.”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“Men
They hail you as their morning star
Because you are the way you are.
If you return the sentiment,
They'll try to make you different;
And once they have you, safe and sound,
They want to change you all around.
Your moods and ways they put a curse on;
They'd make of you another person.
They cannot let you go your gait;
They influence and educate.
They'd alter all that they admired.
They make me sick, they make me tired.”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“You think You're frightening me with Your hell, don't You? You think Your hell is worse than mine.”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“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, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes.”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“Her big heart did not, as is so sadly often the case, inhabit a big bosom.”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“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, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“All I have to be thankful for in this world is that I was sitting down when my garter busted.”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“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, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“Trapped like a trap in a trap”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“There was a reason for the cost of those perfectly plain black dresses.”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“Daily dawns another day;
I must up, to make my way.
Though I dress and drink and eat,
Move my fingers and my feet,
Learn a little, here and there,
Weep and laugh and sweat and swear,
Hear a song, or watch a stage,
Leave some words upon a page,
Claim a foe, or hail a friend-
Bed awaits me at the end.”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“Travel, trouble, music, art, a kiss, a frock, a rhyme --
I never said they feed my heart, but still they pass my time.”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“My love runs by like a day in June,
And he makes no friends of sorrows.
He'll tread his galloping rigadoon
In the pathway of the morrows.
He'll live his days where the sunbeams start,
Nor could storm or wind uproot him.
My own dear love, he is all my heart, --
And I wish somebody'd shoot him.”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“I'll think about something else. I'll just sit quietly. If I could sit still. If I could sit still, maybe I could read. Oh, all the books are about people who love each other, truly and sweetly. What do they want to write about that for? Don't they know it isn't true? Don't they know it's a lie, it's a God-damned lie? What do they have to tell about that for, when they know how it hurts?”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“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, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“Little Words

When you are gone, there is nor bloom nor leaf,
Nor singing sea at night, nor silver birds;
And I can only stare, and shape my grief
In little words.

I cannot conjure loveliness, to drown
The bitter woe that racks my cords apart.
The weary pen that sets my sorrow down
Feeds at my heart.

There is no mercy in the shifting year,
No beauty wraps me tenderly about.
I turn to little words- so you, my dear,
Can spell them out.”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“To me, the raveled sleeve of care is never more painlessly knitted up than in an evening alone in a chair snug yet copious, with a good light and an easily held little volume sloppily printed and bound in inexpensive paper. I do not ask much of it - which is just as well, for that is all I get. It does not matter if I guess the killer, and if I happen to discover, along around page 208, that I have read the work before, I attribute the fact not to the less than arresting powers of the author, but to my own lazy memory. I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours. In all reverence I say Heaven bless the Whodunit, the soothing balm on the wound, the cooling hand on the brow, the opiate of the people."

--Book review Of Ellery Queen: The New York Murders, from Esquire, January 1959”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“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, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn....”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“When you're awake, all the men go and fall for you -
Sleep, pretty lady, and give me a chance
(From the poem "Lullaby")”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“Emily Post's Etiquette is out again, this time in a new and an enlarged edition, and so the question of what to do with my evenings has been all fixed up for me.”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“This level reach of blue is not my sea;
Here are sweet waters, pretty in the sun,
Whose quiet ripples meet obediently
A marked and measured line, one after one.
This is no sea of mine. that humbly laves
Untroubled sands, spread glittering and warm.
I have a need of wilder, crueler waves;
They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.

So let a love beat over me again,
Loosing its million desperate breakers wide;
Sudden and terrible to rise and wane;
Roaring the heavens apart; a reckless tide
That casts upon the heart, as it recedes,
Splinters and spars and dripping, salty weeds.”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“[When asked to use 'horticulture' in a sentence:] You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think.”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“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, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“She is happy, for she knows
That her dust is very pretty”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

“Mrs. Whittaker's dress was always studiously suited to its occasion; thus, her bearing had always that calm that only the correctly attired may enjoy.”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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