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

More quotes by Dorothy Parker

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The House Beautiful is the play lousy.
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This play John Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln 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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His voice was as intimate as the rustle of sheets.
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Somewhere, there, is an analogy, in a small way, if you have the patience for it. But I guess it isn't a very good anecdote. I'm better at animal stories.
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[When asked what was the inspiration for most of her work:] Need of money, dear.
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I won't telephone him. I'll never telephone him again as long as I live. He'll rot in hell, before I'll call him up. You don't have to give me strength, God I have it myself. If he wanted me, he could get me. He knows where I am. He knows I'm waiting here. He's so sure of me, so sure. I wonder why they hate you, as soon as they are sure of you.
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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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[Epitaph:] Involved in a plot.
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She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.
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Innocence is a desirable thing, a dainty thing, an appealing thing, in its place but carried too far, it is merely ridiculous.
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Summer makes me drowsy. Autumn makes me sing. Winter's pretty lousy, but I hate Spring.
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All those writers who write about their own childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.
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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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Newton's Fourth Law: Every action has an equal and opposite satisfaction.
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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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And I'll stay off Verlaine too he was always chasing Rimbauds.
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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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There was a reason for the cost of those perfectly plain black dresses.
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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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Said of her husband on the day their divorce became final: Oh, don't worry about Alan. . . . Alan will always land on somebody's feet.
Dorothy Parker