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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
Stealing
Penmanship
George
Eliot
Spend
Syntax
Somebody
Steals
Study
Pencil
Best
Pencils
Years
Rhetoric
Life
Studying
Beowulf

More quotes by Dorothy Parker

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My land is bare of chattering folk / the clouds are low along the ridges, / and sweet's the air with curly smoke / from all my burning bridges.
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Maybe it is only I, but conditions are such these days, that if you use studiously correct grammar, people suspect you of homosexual tendencies.
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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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... if this world were anything near what it should be there would be no more need of a Book Week than there would be a of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
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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 being told of the death of former President Calvin Coolidge: How could they tell?
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Writing well is the best revenge.
Dorothy Parker
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Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn.
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tomorrow's gone-we'll have tonight!
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If I should labor through daylight and dark, Consecrate, valorous, serious, true, Then on the world I may blazon my mark And what if I don't, and what if I do?
Dorothy Parker
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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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It is that word 'hunny,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.
Dorothy Parker
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If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He gives it to.
Dorothy Parker
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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.
Dorothy Parker
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[When asked what was the inspiration for most of her work:] Need of money, dear.
Dorothy Parker
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The only useful thing I ever learned in school was that if you spit on your eraser it erased ink.
Dorothy Parker
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Mrs. Ewing was a short woman who accepted the obligation borne by so many short women to make up in vivacity what they lack in number of inches from the ground.
Dorothy Parker
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Of Orson Welles: It's like meeting God without dying.
Dorothy Parker
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ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.
Dorothy Parker
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Money was made, not to command our will, But all our lawful pleasures to fulfill. Shame and woe to us, if we our wealth obey The horse doth with the horseman away.
Dorothy Parker