Quote

...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.

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
World
Ink
Pencil
Erase
Pencils
Spit
Outside
Eraser
Taught
Convent
Helping
Erasers

More quotes by Dorothy Parker

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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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But I give you my word, in the entire book there is nothing that cannot be said aloud in mixed company. And there is, also, nothing that makes you a bit the wiser. I wonder--oh, what will you think of me--if those two statements do not verge upon the synonymous.
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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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Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.
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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[On Katharine Hepburn's stage performance:] She ran the whole gamut of emotions, from A to B.
Dorothy Parker
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What writes worse than a Theodore Dreiser? ... Two Theodore Dreisers.
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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.
Dorothy Parker
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There was a reason for the cost of those perfectly plain black dresses.
Dorothy Parker
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Women and elephants never forget.
Dorothy Parker
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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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And if my heart be scarred and burned, The safer, I, for all I learned.
Dorothy Parker
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I can’t write five words but that I change seven.
Dorothy Parker
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Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.
Dorothy Parker
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Money is only congealed snow.
Dorothy Parker
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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.
Dorothy Parker
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ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.
Dorothy Parker
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Genius can write on the back of old envelopes but mere talent requires the finest stationery available.
Dorothy Parker
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A liberal is a man who leaves the room before the fight starts.
Dorothy Parker
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I was always sweet, at first. Oh, it's so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.
Dorothy Parker