Dorothy Parker's wittiest lines (the ones she actually said)
The top 3 according to 24 votes from people: Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses. · Excuse my dust. · Razors pain you… Gas smells awful. / You might as well live.. (Updated Jun 7, 2021.)
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.
Top 12
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1
Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses.
«News Item», first printed in the New York World (1925).
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2
Excuse my dust.
Her proposed epitaph for herself, quoted in Vanity Fair (June 1925).
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3
Razors pain you… Gas smells awful. / You might as well live.
The ending of «Résumé», her darkest and most famous little poem (1925).
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4
What fresh hell can this be?
What she said whenever the doorbell rang, according to her biographer John Keats.
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5
It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes.
The Paris Review interview (1956).
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6
How do they know?
On being told that Calvin Coolidge, famous for saying almost nothing, had died (1933).
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7
Drink and dance and laugh and lie… / For tomorrow we shall die! / (But, alas, we never do.)
«The Flaw in Paganism», in Death and Taxes (1931).
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8
Tonstant Weader fwowed up.
Her «Constant Reader» review of A. A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner, The New Yorker (1928).
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9
Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.
The New Yorker, 4 February 1928.
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10
You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.
Her answer when asked to use «horticulture» in a sentence during a word game.
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11
That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say No in any of them.
Recorded by Alexander Woollcott in «Our Mrs Parker» (1934).
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12
There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit.
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.
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Comments (1)
«Excuse my dust» as an epitaph, genius.