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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

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Dorothy Parker
Age: 73 †
Born: 1893
Born: August 22
Died: 1967
Died: June 7
Columnist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
Screenwriter
Songwriter
Writer
West End
Monmouth County
New Jersey
Dorothy Rothschild
Dot Rothschild
Dottie Rothschild
Somebody
Steals
Study
Pencil
Best
Pencils
Years
Rhetoric
Life
Studying
Beowulf
Stealing
Penmanship
George
Eliot
Spend
Syntax

More quotes by Dorothy Parker

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I hate writing, I love having written.
Dorothy Parker
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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.
Dorothy Parker
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His books are exciting and powerful and — if I may filch the word from the booksy ones — pulsing.
Dorothy Parker
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(Scottish Terriers) have all the compactness of a small dog and all the valor of a big one. And they are so exceedingly sturdy that it is proverbial that the only thing fatal to them is being run over by an automobile - in which case the car itself knows it has been in a fight.
Dorothy Parker
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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
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I shudder at the thought of men.... I'm due to fall in love again
Dorothy Parker
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Accursed from their birth they be Who seek to find monogamy, Pursuing it from bed to bed— I think they would be better dead.
Dorothy Parker
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And if my heart be scarred and burned, The safer, I, for all I learned.
Dorothy Parker
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What writes worse than a Theodore Dreiser? ... Two Theodore Dreisers.
Dorothy Parker
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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. Women alone often developed into experts at the practice. She must never join their dismal league.
Dorothy Parker
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Where unwilling dies the rose buds the new another year.
Dorothy Parker
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People are more than fun than anybody.
Dorothy Parker
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Where's the man could ease a heart Like a satin gown?
Dorothy Parker
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That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say 'No' in any of them.
Dorothy Parker
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The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. The boys have gone hog-wild with liberty, yet the short flat terms used over and over, both in dialogue and narrative, add neither vigor nor clarity the effect is not of shock but of something far more dangerous — tedium.
Dorothy Parker
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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.
Dorothy Parker
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Don't look at me in that tone of voice.
Dorothy Parker
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You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.
Dorothy Parker
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It was written without fear and without research.
Dorothy Parker
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There was a reason for the cost of those perfectly plain black dresses.
Dorothy Parker