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If you looked for things to make you feel hurt and wretched and unnecessary, you were certain to find them.

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
Certain
Find
Feel
Feels
Wretched
Make
Unnecessary
Things
Looked
Attitude
Hurt

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I fell into writing, I suppose, being one of those awful children who wrote verses. I went to a convent in New York-the Blessed Sacrament... I was fired from there, finally, for a lot of things, among them my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion.
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A liberal is a man who leaves the room before the fight starts.
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I was the toast of two continents: Greenland and Australia.
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[On an actor who'd broken her leg in London:] Oh, how terrible. She must have done it sliding down a barrister.
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People are more than fun than anybody.
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[On being told their loquacious, domineering host was 'outspoken':] By whom?
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Hell's afloat in lover's tears.
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[When asked what was the inspiration for most of her work:] Need of money, dear.
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...as for helping me in the outside world, the Convent taught me only that if you spit on a pencil eraser, it will erase ink.
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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.
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[Epitaph:] Involved in a plot.
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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?
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Sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion.
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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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Perhaps it suddenly brought to us the sense of change. Or irresponsibility. But don't forget that, though the people in the twenties seemed like flops, they weren't. Fitzgerald, the rest of them, reckless as they were, drinkers as they were, they worked damn hard and all the time.
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Why, after all, should readers never be harrowed? Surely there is enough happiness in life without having to go to books for it.
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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.
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.
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Los Angeles: Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.
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She will never win him, whose words had shown she feared to lose.
Dorothy Parker