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Dorothy Parker
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“Somehow, no matter how well done an Oscar Wilde play may be, I am always far more absorbed in the audience than in the drama. ... They have a conscious exquisiteness, a deep appreciation of their own culture. ... 'Look at us,' they seem to say. 'We are the cognoscenti. We have come because we can appreciate this thing — we are not as you, poor bonehead, who are here because you couldn't get tickets for the Winter Garden.'”
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“[On John Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln] This play holds the season's record, thus far, with a run of four evening performances and one matinee. By an odd coincidence, it ran just five performances too many.”
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“By the time you swear you're his, / Shivering and sighing, / And he vows his passion is / Infinite, undying — / Lady, make a note of this: / One of you is lying.”
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“Four be the things I'd been better without: / Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.”
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“Four be the things I am wiser to know: / Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.”
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“Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, / A medley of extemporanea; / And love is a thing that can never go wrong; / and I am Marie of Roumania.”
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“Lady, lady, should you meet / One whose ways are all discreet, / One who murmurs that his wife / Is the lodestar of his life, / One who keeps assuring you / That he never was untrue, / Never loved another one ... / Lady, lady, better run!”
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“Scratch a lover, and find a foe. ”
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“Razors pain you; / Rivers are damp; / Acids stain you; / And drugs cause cramp. / Guns aren't lawful; / Nooses give; / Gas smells awful; / You might as well live.”
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“Woman wants monogamy; / Man delights in novelty ... / Woman lives but in her lord; / Count to ten, and man is bored. / With this the gist and sum of it, / What earthly good can come of it?”
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“Why is it no one ever sent me yet / One perfect limousine, do you suppose? / Ah no, it's always just my luck to get / One perfect rose.”
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“Men seldom makes passes / At girls who wear glasses.”
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“The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.”
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“... this book of essays ... has all the depth and glitter of a worn dime ... ”
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“[On William Lyon Phelps's Happiness:] It is second only to a rubber duck as the ideal bathtub companion. It may be held in the hand without causing muscular fatigue ... and it may be read through before the water has cooled. And if it slips down the drain pipe, all right, it slips down the drain pipe.”
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“Ava was young and slender and proud. And she had It. It, hell; she had Those.”
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“Upton Sinclair is his own King Charles' head. He cannot keep himself out of his writings, try though he may; or, by this time, try though he doesn't.”
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“Despite his persecutions, Mr. [Upton] Sinclair reveals himself in Money Writes! to be an enviable man. Always the thing he desires to believe is the thing he feels he knows to be true.”
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“[On Isadora Duncan:] There was never a place for her in the ranks of the terrible, slow army of the cautious. She ran ahead, where there were no paths.”
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“Well, there are always those who cannot distinguish between glitter and glamour ... the glamour of Isadora Duncan came from her great, torn, bewildered, foolhardy soul.”
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“Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.”
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“It may be that this autobiography [Aimee Semple McPherson's] is set down in sincerity, frankness, and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.”
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“Every year, back Spring comes, with the nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off, and the ground all mucked up with arbutus.”
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“There is entirely too much charm around, and something must be done to stop it.”
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“[ReviewingThe House at Pooh Corner:] ... Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”
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“Why, that dog is practically a Phi Beta Kappa. She can sit up and beg, and she can give her paw — I don't say she will but she can.”
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“Byron and Shelley and Keats / Were a trio of lyrical treats.”
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“If, with the literate, I am / Impelled to try an epigram, / I never seek to take the credit; / We all assume that Oscar said it.”
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“It costs me never a stab nor squirm / To tread by chance upon a worm. / 'Aha, my little dear,' I say, / 'Your clan will pay me back one day.'”
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“They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.”
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“For art is a form of catharsis, / And love is a permanent flop, / And work is the province of cattle, / And rest's for a clam in a shell, / So I'm thinking of throwing the battle — / Would you kindly direct me to hell?”
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“That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.”
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“A list of our authors who have made themselves most beloved and, therefore, most comfortable financially, shows that it is our national joy to mistake for the first-rate, the fecund rate.”
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“Surely, if Mr. Lewis in outlining his plot to some friend, had only said, 'Stop me if you've heard this,' more than two hundred pages of Dodsworth need never have been written.”
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“Oh, it's so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.”
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“She had spent the golden time in grudging it going.”
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“ The man she had was kind and clean / And well enough for every day, / But, oh, dear friends, you should have seen / The one that got away!”
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“He'd have the best, and that was none too good; / No barrier could hold, before his terms. / He lies below, correct in cypress wood, / And entertains the most exclusive worms.”
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“Every love's the love before / In a duller dress.”
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“Misfortune, and recited misfortune in especial, may be prolonged to that point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.”
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“[On Lou Tellegen's Women Have Been Kind:] The book ... has all the elegance of a quirked little finger and all the glitter of a pair of new rubbers.”
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“... now that you've got me right down to it, the only thing I didn't like about The Barretts of Wimpole Street was the play.”
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“[On Give Me Yesterday:] Its hero is caused, by a novel device, to fall asleep and a-dream; and thus he is given yesterday. Me, I should have given him twenty years to life.”
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“[On Dashiell Hammett:] ... he is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn.”
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“[On Kay Strozzi in The Silent Witness:] Miss Strozzi ... had the temerity to wear as truly horrible a gown as ever I have seen on the American stage. ... Had she not luckily been strangled by a member of the cast while disporting this garment, I should have fought my way to the stage and done her in, myself.”
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“What writes worse than a Theodore Dreiser? ... Two Theodore Dreisers.”
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“The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'check enclosed.'”
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“The House Beautiful is the play lousy.”
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“How do people go to sleep? I'm afraid I've lost the knack. I might try busting myself smartly over the temple with the night-light. I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things.”
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“And I'll stay off Verlaine too; he was always chasing Rimbauds.”
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“Any stigma will do to beat a dogma.”
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“If you would learn what God thinks about money, you have only to look at those to whom he has given it.”
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“She looked as new as a peeled egg.”
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“You mean those clothes of hers are intentional? My heavens, I always thought she was on her way out of a burning building.”
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“Three highballs, and I think I'm St. Francis of Assisi.”
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“She was an authority on where to place monograms on linen, how to instruct working folk, and what to say in letters of condolence. The word 'lady' figured largely in her conversation.”
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“His voice was intimate as the rustle of sheets ... ”
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“Sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion.”
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“... all men are the same age.”
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“Constant use had not worn ragged the fabric of their friendship.”
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“... she inspected her finger nails of so thick and glistening a red that it seemed as if she but recently had completed tearing an ox apart with her naked hands.”
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“Then she took from her lap a case of gold or some substance near it, and in a minute mirror scanned her face as carefully as if it were verse.”
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“Drink and dance and laugh and lie / Love, the reeling midnight through / For tomorrow we shall die! / (But, alas, we never do.) ”
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“Hickety, pickety, my red hen. / She lays eggs for gentlemen; / But you cannot persuade her with a gun or lariat; / To come across for the proletariat.”
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“... if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.”
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“When your bank account is so overdrawn it's positively photographic, steps must be taken.”
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“Anthologists are lazy fellows who like to spend a quiet evening at home raiding good books.”
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“Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness.”
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“The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. ... Obscenity is too valuable a commodity to chuck around all over the place; it should be taken out of the safe on special occasions only.”
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“[On James Gould Cozzens' By Love Possessed:] It is a vast enterprise encompassing all sorts of love, except, naturally, those branches which extend to Jews, Negroes, and people who have lost track of their great-grandparents ...”
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“Nevil Shute's On the Beach is no Christmas carol, but it seems to me a remarkably fine novel, one which I read, in the peculiarly repulsive phrase, with my eyes glued to the page.”
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“There are those who, in their pride and their innocence, dedicate their careers to writing humorous pieces. Poor dears, the world is stacked against them from the start, for everybody in it has the right to look at their work and say, 'I don't think that's funny.'”
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“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?”
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“I had thought, on starting this composition, that I should define what humor means to me. However, every time I tried to, I had to go and lie down with a cold wet cloth on my head.”
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“Humor to me, Heaven help me, takes in many things. There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind. There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it.”
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“[On Edna Ferber's Ice Palace] ... the book, which is going to be a movie, has the plot and characters of a book which is going to be a movie.”
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“ He [Robert Benchley] and I had an office so tiny that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery.”
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“My verses. I cannot say poems. Like everybody was then, I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.”
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“I went to a convent in New York ... I was fired from there, finally, for a lot of things, among them my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion.”
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“[When asked what was the inspiration for most of her work:] Need of money, dear.”
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“[On female novelists:] As artists they're rot, but as providers they're oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter. And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.”
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“There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”
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“I can't write five words but that I change seven.”
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“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.”
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“I hate almost all rich people, but I think I'd be darling at it.”
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“Hollywood money isn't money. It's congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are.”
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“Once I was coming down a street in Beverly Hills and I saw a Cadillac about a block long, and out of the side window was a wonderfully slinky mink, and an arm, and at the end of the arm was a hand in a white suede glove wrinkled around the wrist, and in the hand was a bagel with a bite out of it.”
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“It's not the tragedies that kill us, it's the messes.”
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“ I misremember who first was cruel enough to nurture the cocktail party into life. But perhaps it would be not too much to say, in fact it would be not enough to say, that it was not worth the trouble.”
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“[On being told party guests were ducking for apples:] There, but for a typographical error, is the story of my life.”
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“[On a Yale prom:] If all those sweet young things present were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised.”
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“[To a friend whose sick cat had to be put down:] Try curiosity.”
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“Brevity is the soul of lingerie ... ”
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“[After she and Clare Boothe Luce met in a doorway and the latter said, 'Age before beauty':] Pearls before swine.”
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“Excuse me, everybody, I have to go to the bathroom. I really have to telephone, but I'm too embarrassed to say so.”
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“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
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“[When asked if she'd enjoyed a cocktail party:] Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.”
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“[On Katharine Hepburn's stage performance:] She ran the whole gamut of emotions, from A to B.”
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“[On being told their loquacious, domineering host was 'outspoken':] By whom?”
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“He's a writer for the ages — for the ages of four to eight.”
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“[On one of her party guests:] That woman speaks eighteen languages and can't say 'No' in any of them.”
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“You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.”
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“[To a snobbish young man who said 'I can't bear fools':] That's queer. Your mother could.”
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“[Hospitalized and pressing the nurse's button before dictating letters to her secretary:] This should assure us of at least forty-five minutes of undisturbed privacy.”
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“[To woman bragging about having kept her husband for seven years:] Don't worry, if you keep him long enough, he'll come back in style.”
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“[On hearing that President Coolidge was dead:] How can you tell?”
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“[On naming her canary 'Onan':] Because it spills its seed upon the ground.”
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“[Playing I-Can-Give-You-A-Sentence with the word 'horticulture':] You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think.”
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“[On Lucius Beebe's Shoot If You Must:] This must be a gift book. That is to say, a book which you wouldn't take on any other terms.”
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“[On being shown an apartment by a real estate agent:] Oh, dear, that's much too big. All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.”
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“[On being told that world-famous transgender Christine Jorgensen was planning a trip to the States to visit her mother:] And what sex, may I ask, is the mother?”
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“[At the reception following her remarriage to Alan Campbell:] People who haven't talked to each other in years are on speaking terms again today — including the bride and groom.”
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“[On hearing that Clare Boothe Luce was invariably kind to her inferiors:] And where does she find them?”
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“[Requesting her epitaph to read this way:] Excuse my dust.”
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“[Suggesting an epitaph for herself:] This is on me.”
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“I was the toast of two continents: Greenland and Australia.”
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“[On her abortion:] It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.”
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“[On an actor who'd broken her leg in London:] Oh, how terrible. She must have done it sliding down a barrister.”
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“[Allegedly said when told an editor urgently needed a promised article:] Tell him I've been too fucking busy — or vice versa.”
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“I require only three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.”
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“... ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.”
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“Sure, you make money writing on the coast ... but that money is like so much compressed snow. It goes so fast it melts in your hand.”
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“... her locks had been so frequently and drastically brightened and curled that to caress them, one felt, would be rather like running one's fingers through julienne potatoes.”
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“When I was young and bold and strong, / Oh, right was right and wrong was wrong.”
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“It has lately been drawn to your correspondent's attention that, at social gatherings, she is not the human magnet she would be. Indeed, it turns out that as a source of entertainment, conviviality, and good fun, she ranks somewhere between a sprig of parsley and a single ice-skate.”
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“Years are only garments, and you either wear them with style all your life, or else you go dowdy to the grave.”
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“People ought to be one of two things, young or dead.”
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“Prince, a precept I'd leave for you, / Coined in Eden, existing yet: / Skirt the parlor, and shun the zoo — / Women and elephants never forget.”
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“[After hearing Louella Parsons talk interminably about the death of her dog:] Next time wouldn't it be simpler just to adopt one?”
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“[About the head of Paramount who was five-foot-four:] A pony's ass.”
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“[To a barroom bore during the period of her blacklisting in the '40s:] With the crown of thorns I wear, why should I be bothered with a prick like you?”
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“The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant — and let the air out of the tires.”
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“Guido Natso is natso guido.”
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“[From a window in the Writer's Building at MGM, which overlooked a cemetery:] Hello down there. It might interest you to know that up here we are just as dead as you are.”
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“[On the ringing of her doorbell or telephone:] What fresh hell is this?”
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“[The transatlantic crossing was] so rough that the only thing I could keep on my stomach was the first mate.”
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“[Telegram sent (collect) after an ostentatious pregnancy:] Good work, Mary. We all knew you had it in you.”
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“[To the British actor who annoyed her by repeated references to his busy 'shedule':] I think you're full of skit.”
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“Listen, Fred, don't feel badly when I die, because I've been dead for a long time.”
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“When asked by Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker, why she hadn't been in the office for a week to write her article:] Someone was using the pencil.”
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“The only 'ism' Hollywood really believes in is plagiarism.”
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“[On a gay British actor:] He simply buggers description.”
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“Scratch an actor and you'll find an actress.”
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“[To a federal agent:] Listen, I can't even get my dog to stay down. Do I look to you like someone who could overthrow the government?”
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“[Completely bored by a country weekend, wiring to a friend:] For heaven's sake, rush me a loaf of bread, enclosing saw and file.”
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“Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.”
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“Skiing is difficult and none of my business.”
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“If you attend this drama and if you don't knit, bring a book.”
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“She wore a low but futile décolletage.”
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“[Seeing Henry and Clare Boothe Luce:] Here come Arsenic and Old Luce!”
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“Just before they made S.J. Perelman, they broke the mold.”
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“Hollywood is one place in the world where you can die of encouragement.”
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“Youth is a disease from which we all recover.”
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“People are more fun than anyone.”
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“I don't know much about being a millionaire, but I'm sure I'd be darling at it.”
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“Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open, and it stays. Clutch it, and it darts away.”
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“Genius can write on the back of old envelopes but mere talent requires the finest stationery available.”
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“[Epitaph:] Involved in a plot.”
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“[On Alan Campbell, whom she married twice:] Oh, don't worry about Alan ... Alan will always land on somebody's feet.”
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“I love to drink Martinis, / Two at the very most / Three, I'm under the table; / Four, I'm under the host.”
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“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.”
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“Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.”
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“Lips that taste of tears, they say / Are the best for kissing.”
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“In youth, it was a way I had / To do my best to please, / And change, with every passing lad, / To suit his theories. / But now I know the things I know, / And do the things I do, / And if you do not like me so, / To hell, my love, with you!”
Dorothy Parker, U.S. writer, humorist, critic, poet
(1893 - 1967)
Full name: Dorothy Rothschild Parker.