"I shall die but that is all that I shall do for death."
— Edna St.Vincent Millay (Selected Poems)

"Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it. (in a letter written while she was in college)"
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

"After all my erstwhile dear, my no longer cherished;
Need we say it was not love, just because it perished? "
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

"I know what my heart is like
Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
Left there by the tide,
A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay (Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay)

"Soar, eat ether, see what has never been seen; depart, be lost, but climb."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

"I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And vows were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,--
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

"What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning, but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

"I will be the gladdest thing under the sun! I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick one."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

"There is no God.
But it does not matter.
Man is enough."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Time doth flit; oh shit."
— Dorothy Parker

"If I didn't care for fun and such,
I'd probably amount to much.
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn."
— Dorothy Parker

"If wild my breast and sore my pride,
I bask in dreams of suicide,
If cool my heart and high my head
I think 'How lucky are the dead.'"
— Dorothy Parker (The Complete Poems of Dorothy Parker)

"I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen."
— Dorothy Parker

"Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses."
— Dorothy Parker

"I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
after four I'm under my host."
— Dorothy Parker

"Four be the things I'd have been better without: love, curiosity, freckles and doubt."
— Dorothy Parker

"That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment."
— Dorothy Parker

"(When asked to use "horticulture" in a sentence) You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think."
— Dorothy Parker (The Portable Dorothy Parker)

"Ducking for apples -- change one letter and it's the story of my life."
— Dorothy Parker

"So, you're the man who can't spell 'fuck.'"
-- Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer after publishers had convinced Mailer to replace the word with a euphemism, 'fug,' in his 1948 book, "The Naked and the Dead."
— Dorothy Parker

"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 Romania."
— 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 (The Portable Dorothy Parker)

"The days will rally, wreathing
Their crazy tarantelle;
And you must go on breathing,
But I'll be safe in hell.

Like January weather,
The years will bite and smart,
And pull your bones together
To wrap your chattering heart.

The pretty stuff you're made of
Will crack and crease and dry.
The thing you are afraid of
Will look from every eye.

You will go faltering after
The bright, imperious line,
And split your throat on laughter,
And burn your eyes with brine.

You will be frail and musty
With peering, furtive head,
Whilst I am young and lusty
Among the roaring dead."
— Dorothy Parker

"Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common."
— Dorothy Parker

"Her mind lives tidily, apart from cold and noise and pain, And bolts the door against her heart, Out wailing in the rain."
— Dorothy Parker

"Oh, seek, my love, your newer way;
I'll not be left in sorrow.
So long as I have yesterday,
Go take your damned tomorrow!"
— Dorothy Parker

"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."
— Dorothy Parker

"A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way."
— Mark Twain

"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said 'I don't know'."
— Mark Twain

"There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he less savage than the other savages."
— Mark Twain

"Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in."
— Mark Twain

"The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also."
— Mark Twain

"We may not pay Satan reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talents."
— Mark Twain

"Often it seems a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat."
— Mark Twain

"Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute."
— Mark Twain (Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings)

"Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.

Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court."
— Mark Twain (Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings)

"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."
— Mark Twain

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
— Mark Twain (The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations)

"Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it."
— Mark Twain

"Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident."
— Mark Twain

"Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary."
— Mark Twain

"Golf is a good way to ruin a walk."
— Mark Twain

"If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed."
— Mark Twain

"Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that this standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes."
— Mark Twain

"…there was no crime in unconscious plagiarism; that I committed it everyday, that he committed it everyday, that every man alive on earth who writes or speaks commits it every day and not merely once or twice but every time he open his mouth… there is nothing of our own in it except some slight change born of our temperament, character, environment, teachings and associations…

- M.T. speaking of a letter he received from Doctor Holmes acquitting MT of the crime of borrowing Holmes’ words in a story"
— Mark Twain

"I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey."
— Mark Twain

"I take my only exercise acting as a pallbearer at the funerals of my friends who exercise regularly."
— Mark Twain

"The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for."
— Mark Twain

"It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare."
— Mark Twain

"Wheresoever she was, there was Eden."
— Mark Twain (The Diaries of Adam and Eve)