Dorothy Parker Quotes

All I say is, nobody has any business to go around looking like a horse and behaving as if it were all right. You don’t catch horses going around looking like people, do you?
DOROTHY PARKER

Animal Business People Right Yourself
Maybe it is only I, but conditions are such these days, that if you use studiously correct grammar, people suspect you of homosexual tendencies.
DOROTHY PARKER

Identity Literature Study Yourself
If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me.
DOROTHY PARKER

Company Myself Talk Yourself
If all the young ladies who attended the Yale promenade dance were laid end to end, no one would be the least surprised.
DOROTHY PARKER

Dance End Surprise Woman Young
Never throw mud: you can miss the target, but your hands will remain dirty.
DOROTHY PARKER

Clean Dirty Hands Nature Play Target Yourself
The best way to avoid a hangover is to stay drunk.
DOROTHY PARKER

Avoid Best Drink Stay Way
Most good women are hidden treasures who are only safe because nobody looks for them.
DOROTHY PARKER

Goodness Hide Safety Treasure Woman
Now, look, baby, ‘Union’ is spelled with 5 letters. It is not a four-letter word.
DOROTHY PARKER

Letter Look Word
[On the ringing of her doorbell or telephone:] What fresh hell is this?
DOROTHY PARKER

Funny Hell Herself Phone
It’s not the tragedies that kill us; it’s the messes.
DOROTHY PARKER

Kill Mess Myself Tragedy
Bewildered is the fox who lives to find that grapes beyond reach can be really sour.
DOROTHY PARKER

Beyond Live Wild
You do what you can, and you do it because you should. But all you can do is all you can do.
DOROTHY PARKER

Action Responsibility Yourself
Vice is nice, but liquor is quicker.
DOROTHY PARKER

Alcohol Quick Vice
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

Clean Professional Way Writing
I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it.
DOROTHY PARKER

Hate Myself People Rich
You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.
DOROTHY PARKER

Herself Leadership Thinking Yourself
I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money.
DOROTHY PARKER

Goodness Money Myself Togetherness Writing
Friends come and go but I wouldn’t have thought you’d be one of them.
DOROTHY PARKER

Friendship Myself Oneself Thinking
Don’t feel bad when I die; I’ve been dead for a long time.
DOROTHY PARKER

Bad Death Feeling Myself Time
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

End Happiness History Human Willing
Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, can be prolonged to the point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.
DOROTHY PARKER

Excitement Fortune Irritation
It was written without fear and without research.
DOROTHY PARKER

Fear Research Writing
This is me apologizing. I am a fool, a bird-brain, a liar and a horse-thief. I wouldn’t touch a superlative again with an umbrella.
DOROTHY PARKER

Fools Myself Sorry Touch
What ever beauty may be it has for its basis order and for its essence unity Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.
DOROTHY PARKER

Beautiful Clean Deep Order Skin Ugly
Three be the things I shall never attain: Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.
DOROTHY PARKER

Enough Jealous Satisfaction Wine
Said after she had been seriously ill: The doctors were very brave about it.
DOROTHY PARKER

Brave Doctor Serious
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

Funny Life Study Theft Yourself

Famous American poets