# Dorothy Parker's wittiest lines (the ones she actually said)

The sharpest one-liners of the Algonquin Round Table's queen, each with where it was printed or who recorded it. Famous fakes like «This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly…» are left out.

- 24 votes · 12 items
- Jun 7, 2021 · Logan K.
- https://even.best/en/l/1384/dorothy-parker-s-wittiest-lines-the-ones-she-actually-said

## Top 12

1. **Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses.** (5 · ▲6 ▼1) — «News Item», first printed in the New York World (1925).
2. **Excuse my dust.** (2 · ▲3 ▼1) — Her proposed epitaph for herself, quoted in Vanity Fair (June 1925).
3. **Razors pain you… Gas smells awful. / You might as well live.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — The ending of «Résumé», her darkest and most famous little poem (1925).
4. **What fresh hell can this be?** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — What she said whenever the doorbell rang, according to her biographer John Keats.
5. **It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — The Paris Review interview (1956).
6. **How do they know?** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — On being told that Calvin Coolidge, famous for saying almost nothing, had died (1933).
7. **Drink and dance and laugh and lie… / For tomorrow we shall die! / (But, alas, we never do.)** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — «The Flaw in Paganism», in Death and Taxes (1931).
8. **Tonstant Weader fwowed up.** (0 · ▲1 ▼1) — Her «Constant Reader» review of A. A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner, The New Yorker (1928).
9. **Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — The New Yorker, 4 February 1928.
10. **You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Her answer when asked to use «horticulture» in a sentence during a word game.
11. **That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say No in any of them.** (-1 · ▲1 ▼2) — Recorded by Alexander Woollcott in «Our Mrs Parker» (1934).
12. **There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit.** (-1 · ▲1 ▼2) — Interview with The Paris Review (1956): «Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.»

How is this ranking ordered? By people's votes: each ▲ adds a point and each ▼ takes one away. Anyone can vote and add what is missing.