Quote

[Hospitalized and pressing the nurse's button before dictating letters to her secretary:] This should assure us of at least forty-five minutes of undisturbed privacy.

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
Nurse
Secretary
Hospitalized
Privacy
Undisturbed
Forty
Dictating
Letters
Pressing
Minutes
Assure
Least
Button
Five
Buttons

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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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[On Katharine Hepburn's stage performance:] She ran the whole gamut of emotions, from A to B.
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London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it.
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Once, when I was young and true. Someone left me sad - Broke my brittle heart in two And that is very bad. Love is for unlucky folk, Love is but a curse. Once there was a heart I broke And that, I think, is worse.
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I shudder at the thought of men.... I'm due to fall in love again
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He is a writer for the ages, the ages of four to eight.
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Scratch a king and find a fool!
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I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.
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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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I know that an author must be brave enough to chop away clinging tentacles of good taste for the sake of a great work. But this is no great work, you see.
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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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His books are exciting and powerful and — if I may filch the word from the booksy ones — pulsing.
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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.
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Nevil Shute's On the Beach is no Christmas carol, but it seems to me a remarkably fine novel, one which I read, in the peculiarly repulsive phrase, with my eyes glued to the page.
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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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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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[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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ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.
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Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it and it darts away.
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[Completely bored by a country weekend, wiring to a friend:] For heaven's sake, rush me a loaf of bread, enclosing saw and file.
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