Complete Stories Quotes

“She dreamed by day of never again putting on tight shoes, of never having to laugh and listen and admire, of never more being a good sport. Never.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“‎Oh, anywhere, driver, anywhere - it doesn't matter. Just keep driving.
It's better here in this taxi than it was walking. It's no good my trying to walk. There is always a glimpse through the crowd of someone who looks like him—someone with his swing of the shoulders, his slant of the hat. And I think it's he, I think he's come back. And my heart goes to scalding water and the buildings sway and bend above me. No, it's better to be here. But I wish the driver would go fast, so fast that people walking by would be a long gray blur, and I could see no swinging shoulders, no slanted hat.
Dorothy Parker, Sentiment, Harper's Bazaar, May 1933.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“To keep something, you must take care of it. More, you must understand just what sort of care it requires. You must know the rules and abide by them. She could do that. She had been doing it all the months, in the writing of her letters to him. There had been rules to be learned in that matter, and the first of them was the hardest: never say to him what you want him to say to you. Never tell him how sadly you miss him, how it grows no better, how each day without him is sharper than the day before. Set down for him the gay happenings about you, bright little anecdotes, not invented, necessarily, but attractively embellished. Do not bedevil him with the pinings of your faithful heart because he is your husband, your man, your love. For you are writing to none of these. You are writing to a soldier.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“He’s always with me, he and all his beauty and his cruelty.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“What is life, anyway? A death sentence. The longest distance between two points.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“And when it ends, only those places where you have known sorrow are kindly to you. If you revisit the scenes of your happiness, your heart must burst of its agony. And”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“Love is like quick-silver in the hand, Sylvie. Leave the fingers open and it stays in the palm; clutch it, and it darts away.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“Let the past die, my child, and go gaily on from its unmarked grave.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“Please don’t let me hope, dear God. Please don’t. I”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“I don’t ask You to make it easy for me—You can’t do that, for all that You could make a world.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“Oh, it’s so easy to be sweet to people before you love them. I”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“The dinner itself might well have been planned by the same mind that had devised the décor: black bean soup, crab meat and slivers of crab shell done in cream, roasted crown of lamb with bone tips decently encased in little paper drawers, tiny hard potatoes, green peas ruined by chopped carrots, asparagus instead of salad, and the dessert called, perhaps a shade hysterically, Cherries Jubilee.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“For herself, she declared that she paid no attention to her birthdays—didn’t give a hoot about them; and it is true that when you have amassed several dozen of the same sort of thing, it loses that rarity which is the excitement of collectors.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“Honest, I won’t ever do it again. I’ll go straight, after this. I’ll never go to bed again, if I can only sleep now.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“I’m never going to accomplish anything; that’s perfectly clear to me. I’m never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don’t do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don’t even do that any more. I don’t amount to the powder to blow me to hell. I’ve turned out to be nothing but a bit of flotsam.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“nothing like a whopping big inheritance to abort apprehensions.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“If you looked for things to make you feel hurt and wretched and unnecessary”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“There is no safety for the tender”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“You mean those clothes of hers are intentional? My heavens, I always thought she was on her way out of a burning building.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“Three highballs, and I think I’m St. Francis of Assisi.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“I liked him,” she said. “I haven’t any feeling at all because he’s a colored man. I felt just as natural as I would with anybody. Talked to him just as naturally, and everything. But honestly, I could hardly keep a straight face. I kept thinking of Burton. Oh, wait till I tell Burton I called him ‘Mister’!”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“Why, he’s awfully nice. Just as nice as he can be. Nice manners, and everything. You know, so many colored people, you give them an inch, and they walk all over you. But he doesn’t try any of that. Well, he’s got more sense, I suppose. He’s really nice. Don’t you think so?”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“I haven’t the slightest feeling about colored people. Why, I’m just crazy about some of them. They’re just like children—just as easy-going, and always singing and laughing and everything. Aren’t they the happiest things you ever saw in your life? Honestly, it makes me laugh just to hear them.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“Dorothy Parker wrote strong prose for most of her life, and she wrote a lot of it, remaining relentlessly compassionate regarding, and interested in, the sufferings primarily of those who could not extricate themselves from the emotional tortures of unsuccessful personal relationships.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“Two people can’t go on and on and on, doing the same things year after year, when only one of them likes doing them . . . and still be happy.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“What can you say, when a man asks you to dance with him? I most certainly will NOT dance with you, I'll see you in hell first.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“I wonder why it's wrong to be sentimental. People are so contemptuous of feeling. 'You wouldn't catch me ME sitting alone and mooning,' they say. 'Moon' is what they say when they mean remember, and they are so proud of not remembering. It's strange, how they pride themselves upon their lacks. 'I never take anything seriously,' they say. 'I simply couldn't imagine,' they say, 'letting myself care so much that I could be hurt.' They say, 'No one person could me that important to ME.' And why, why do they think they're right?”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“[…] el orgullo se siente herido más por lo que imagina que por la realidad.”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“the”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“Si nadie hubiera aprendido a leer, muy pocos se habrían enamorado"
"Si nadie hubiera aprendido a desnudarse, muy pocas personas estarían enamoradas”
― Dorothy Parker, The Complete Stories of Dorothy Parker