Wednesday, May 2, 2007

IN ADORATION OF DOROTHY PARKER - My Favorite Parkerisms.


The two most beautiful words in the English language are “check enclosed.”

Money is only congealed snow.

Maybe it is only I, but conditions are such these days, that if you use studiously correct grammar, people suspect you of homosexual tendencie

Wit has truth in it ... wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

...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.

Tonstant Weader fwowed up. (Closing words of review of The House at Pooh Corner, in Parker’s “Constant Reader” column.)


People Who Do things exceed my endurance;God, for a man that solicits insurance!


And there was that wholesale libel on a Yale prom. If all the girls attending it were laid end to end, Mrs. Parker said, she wouldn’t be at all surprised.


. . . have heard it said that it took Messrs. Shipman and Hymer [the playwrights] just three- and-a-half days to write their drama. I should like to know what they were doing during the three days. (On a review, written for Vanity Fair magazine, of a bad play.)


I do wish that as long as they are translating the thing, they would go right on ahead, while they’re at it, and translate Fedor Vasilyevich Protosov and Georgei Dmitrievich Abreskov and Ivan Petrovich Alexandrov into Joe and Harry and Fred. (On the long names characteristic of Russia and common in Russian literature)


Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness.


The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.


This play holds the season’s record [for early closing], thus far, with a run of four evening performances and one matinee. By an odd coincidence it ran just five performances too many.


I was the toast of two continents: Greenland and Australia.


That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say No in any of them.


He and I had an office so tiny that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery.


How can they tell? (On being told of the death of former President Calvin Coolidge.)


[We look like] a road company of the Last Supper. (On lunching with James Thurber and others at the Algonquin Round Table.)
For a short bio of this wonderful writer, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Parker

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