Dorothy Parker On Lillian Hellman Quotes

#1. "Hence," goes on the professor, "definitions of happiness are interesting." I suppose the best thing to do with that is to let is pass. Me, I never saw a definition of happiness that could detain me after train-time, but that may be a matter of lack of opportunity, of inattention, or of congenital rough luck. If definitions of happiness can keep Professor Phelps on his toes, that is little short of dandy. We might just as well get on along to the next statement, which goes like this: "One of the best" (we are still on definitions of happiness) "was given in my Senior year at college by Professor Timothy Dwight: 'The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts.'" Promptly one starts recalling such Happiness Boys as Nietzche, Socrates, de Maupassant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, and Poe."
-Review of the book, Happiness, by (Professor) William Lyon Phelps. Review title: The Professor Goes in for Sweetness and Light; November 5, 1927 #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#2. Sometimes I think I'll give up trying, and just go completely Russian and sit on a stove and moan all day. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#3. [On Oscar Wilde:]
If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.
[Life Magazine, June 2, 1927] #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#4. I can't talk about Hollywood. It was a horror to me when I was there and it's a horror to look back on. I can't imagine how I did it. When I got away from it I couldn't even refer to the place by name. 'Out there,' I called it. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#5. The only useful thing I ever learned in school was that if you spit on your eraser it erased ink. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#6. 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. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#7. There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat. #Quote by Lillian Hellman

#8. [On Kay Strozzi in The Silent Witness:] Miss Strozzi ... had the temerity to wear as truly horrible a gown as ever I have seen on the American stage ... Had she not luckily been strangled by a member of the cast while disporting this garment, I should have fought my way to the stage and done her in, myself. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#9. Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter 'repented', changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. #Quote by Lillian Hellman

#10. Mr. Wodehouse is a prose stylist of such startling talent that Frankie nearly skipped around with glee when she first read some of his phrases. Until her discovery of Something Fresh on the top shelf of Ruth's bookshelf one bored summer morning, Frankie's leisure reading had consister primarily of paperback mysteries she found on the spinning racks at the public library down the block from her house, and the short stories of Dorothy Parker. Wodehouse's jubilant wordplay bore itself into her synapses like a worm into a fresh ear of corn. #Quote by E. Lockhart

#11. When I was young and bold and strong,
The right was right, the wrong was wrong.
With plume on high and flag unfurled,
I rode away to right the world.
But now I'm old - and good and bad,
Are woven in a crazy plaid.
I sit and say the world is so,
And wise is s/he who lets it go. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#12. When asked by her publisher why her work had not been submitted while on her honeymoon: I've been too fucking busy or vice versa #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#13. If someone had told me, don't say anything about Lillian Hellman because she'll sue you, it wouldn't have stopped me. It might have spurred me on. #Quote by Lillian Hellman

#14. [On the ringing of her doorbell or telephone:] What fresh hell is this? #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#15. The cleverest woman on earth is the biggest fool on earth with a man. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#16. The answer comes to me through studying the lives of the Rosa Parks and the Vaclav Havels and the Nelson Mandelas and the Dorothy Days of this world. These are people who have come to understand that no punishment that anybody could lay on us could possibly be worse than the punishment we lay on ourselves by conspiring in our own diminishment, by living a divided life, by failing to make that fundamental decision to act and speak on the outside in ways consonant with what we know to be true on the inside. #Quote by Parker J. Palmer

#17. [On hearing that Clare Boothe Luce was invariably kind to her inferiors:] And where does she find them? #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#18. But then everybody who has been in the Soviet Union for any length of time has noticed their concern with the United States: we may be the enemy, but we are the admired enemy, and the so-called good life for us is the to-be-good life for them. During the war, the Russian combination of dislike and grudging admiration for us, and ours for them, seemed to me like the innocent rivalry of two men proud of being large, handsome and successful. But I was wrong. They have chosen to imitate and compete with the most vulgar aspects of American life, and we have chosen, as in the revelations of the CIA bribery of intellectuals and scholars, to say, "But the Russians do the same thing," as if honor were a mask that you put on and took off at a costume ball. They condemn Vietnam, we condemn Hungary. But the moral tone of giants with swollen heads, fat fingers pressed over the atom bomb, staring at each other across the forests of the world, is monstrously comic. #Quote by Lillian Hellman

#19. Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."
(on Lillian Hellman) #Quote by Mary McCarthy

#20. Everything I am is based on this ugly building on its lonely lawn - lit up during winter darkness; open in the slashing rain - which allowed a girl so poor she didn't even own a purse to come in twice a day and experience actual magic: traveling through time, making contact with the dead - Dorothy Parker, Stella Gibbons, Charlotte Brontë, Spike Milligan.

A library in the middle of a community is a cross be-tween an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead. A human with a brain and a heart and a desire to be uplifted, rather than a customer with a credit card and an inchoate "need" for "stuff." A mall - the shops - are places where your money makes the wealthy wealthier. But a library is where the wealthy's taxes pay for you to become a little more extraordinary, instead. A satisfying reversal. A balancing of the power. #Quote by Caitlin Moran

#21. Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter "repented," changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now. #Quote by Lillian Hellman

#22. As others grown more intelligent under stress, I grow heavy, as if I were an animal on a chain. #Quote by Lillian Hellman

#23. Genius can write on the back of old envelopes but mere talent requires the finest stationery available. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#24. ...I have read but little of Madame Glyn. I did not know that things like "It" were going on. I have misspent my days. When I think of all those hours I flung away in reading William James and Santayana, when I might have been reading of life, throbbing, beating, perfumed life, I practically break down. Where, I ask you, have I been, that no true word of Madame Glyn's literary feats has come to me?

But even those far, far better informed than I must work a bit over the opening sentence of Madame Glyn's foreword to her novel" "This is not," the says, drawing her emeralds warmly about her, "the story of the moving picture entitled It, but a full character study of the story It, which the people in the picture read and discuss." I could go mad, in a nice way, straining to figure that out.

...Well it turns out that Ava and John meet, and he begins promptly to "vibrate with passion." ...
...It goes on for nearly three hundred pages, with both of them vibrating away like steam launches."

-Review of the book, It, by Elinor Glyn. Review title: Madame Glyn Lectures on "It," with Illustrations; November 26, 1927. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#25. 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. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#26. 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. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#27. Men don't like nobility in woman. Not any men. I suppose it is because the men like to have the copyrights on nobility
if there is going to be anything like that in a relationship. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#28. I've seen the way he dances; it looks like something you do on Saint Walpurgis Night. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#29. We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them. #Quote by Lillian Hellman

#30. Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. (Softly) Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it. #Quote by Lillian Hellman

#31. There was nothing separate about her days. Like drops on the window-pane, they ran together and trickled away. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#32. [On an actor who'd broken her leg in London:] Oh, how terrible. She must have done it sliding down a barrister. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#33. [At the reception following her remarriage to Alan Campbell:] People who haven't talked to each other in years are on speaking terms again today - including the bride and groom. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#34. [On Dashiell Hammett:] ... he is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#35. I've always had great satisfaction out of writing the plays. I've not always had great satisfaction out of seeing them produced-although often I've had satisfaction there. When things go well in production, on opening there's no nicer feeling in the world-what could be nicer than watching an audience respond? You can't that from a book. It's a fine feeling to walk into the theater and see living people respond to something you've done. #Quote by Lillian Hellman

#36. [Suggesting an epitaph for herself:] This is on me. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#37. ...It's not that she has not tried to improve her condition before acknowledging its hopelessness. (Oh, come on, let's get the hell out of this, and get into the first person.) I have sought, by study, to better my form and make myself Society's Darling. You see, I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock about a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen, but I thought that maybe I might be the girl to start the vogue. I would become brilliant. I would sparkle. I would hold whole dinner tables spellbound. I would have throngs fighting to come within hearing distance of me while the weakest, elbowed mercilessly to the outskirts, would cry "What did she say?" or "Oh, please ask her to tell it again." That's what I would do. Oh I could just hear myself."

-Review of the books, Favorite Jokes of Famous People, by Bruce Barton; The Technique of the Love Affair by "A Gentlewoman." (Actually by Doris Langley Moore.) Review title: Wallflower's Lament; November 17, 1928. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#38. This must be a gift book. That is to say a book, which you wouldn't take on any other terms. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#39. First he goes to work and he takes some pineapple syrup and he puts it in a glass, and then he puts in just a liddle, lid-dle bit of that juice off them bottles full of red cherries, and then he puts in the gin and the ginger ale, and then he gets him a big, long piece of pineapple and he lays that in, and then when he gets the orange in and puts that old red cherry on top - well! That's the way Horace does when he fixes a mint julep." The #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#40. This isn't my head I've got on now. I think this is something that used to belong to Walt Whitman. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#41. [On being told their loquacious, domineering host was 'outspoken':] By whom? #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#42. 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? #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#43. Sure, you make money writing on the coast ... but that money is like so much compressed snow. It goes so fast it melts in your hand. #Quote by Dorothy Parker

#44. The days will rally, wreathing
Their crazy tarantelle;
And you must go on breathing,
But I'll be safe in hell.

Like January weather,
The years will bite and smart,
And pull your bones together
To wrap your chattering heart.

The pretty stuff you're made of
Will crack and crease and dry.
The thing you are afraid of
Will look from every eye.

You will go faltering after
The bright, imperious line,
And split your throat on laughter,
And burn your eyes with brine.

You will be frail and musty
With peering, furtive head,
Whilst I am young and lusty
Among the roaring dead. #Quote by Dorothy Parker