It is greatly accepted that Dorothy Parker made the following statement in response to her editor harping on her while she was on honey moon
“Tell him I’m fucking busy, and vice versa”
and I have not found a reputable source to tell me otherwise.
So what is your favorite Dorothy Parker quote, or at least your favorite quote attributed to Dorothy Parker?
There is a canard around the board, which I’m not positive I want to dispute, that our own Eve is the reincarnation of Dorothy, or at least of her wit. I look forward to her selection.
One of my favorites is her four-word book review (in her Constant Reader column) of a too-twee-for-words child’s-book literary effort: “Tonstant Weader thwowed up.”
Another classic:
"If all the girls who attend Swarthmore, Vassar, and Wellesley were laid end to end…
Oh, my dear, I am so flattered, you’ll be the first to see the new flat I’m moving into next week. It’s just big enough to lay a hat and a few friends.
As the story goes, Dorothy Parker and Clare Boothe Luce arrived at a doorway simultaneously. Clare gestured to indicate that Dorothy should go first, saying “Age before beauty.”
Dorothy swept through the door and muttered “Pearls before swine.”
Oh lordy, how I love that line! I have used it several times in appropriate circumstances. I hope someone thought I made it up.
. . . I’ve heard that one told about everyone from Dorothy Parker to Bea Lillie to Mrs. Patrick Campbell to Bette Davis. Sadly, we’ll probably never pin it down.
Didn’t we have a thread years ago in which we tried unsuccessfully to verify the quote This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly–it is to be thrown with great force?
Supposedly, when it was announced that a British actress had broken her leg, Dorothy Parker said “I bet this happened while she was sliding down a barrister.”
I thought it was generally accepted? One of the best arguments for reincarnation I’ve ever seen, at any rate.
My own personal favourite:
*A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet -
One perfect rose.
>SNIP< *
A tiny little nit, but it needs picking nonetheless: Dottie said that about Ava Cleveland, the character in the book It, not Clara Bow in the movie. She began the review, “It, the chef d’ouevre of Madame Elinor Glyn, has come into my life. And Sherman’s coming into Atlanta is but a sneaking, tiptoe performance in comparison.”
Fwowed, not thwowed. And it wasn’t a four-word review. The complete review is collected in the Viking Portable Dorothy Parker.
I like Re´sume (the “Acids pain you” poem) and made my mother copy it out of a book for me when I was young, which perhaps disturbed her mre than I had intended. But my favorite is from her review of Dreiser’s Dawn: "Nearly six-hundred sheets to the title of Dawn: God help us one and all if Mr. Dreiser ever elects to write anything called “June Twenty-first”!