Love > Love's Quotes

“Symptom Recital

I do not like my state of mind;
I'm bitter, querulous, unkind.
I hate my legs, I hate my hands,
I do not yearn for lovelier lands.
I dread the dawn's recurrent light;
I hate to go to bed at night.
I snoot at simple, earnest folk.
I cannot take the gentlest joke.
I find no peace in paint or type.
My world is but a lot of tripe.
I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted.
For what I think, I'd be arrested.
I am not sick, I am not well.
My quondam dreams are shot to hell.
My soul is crushed, my spirit sore;
I do not like me any more.
I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.
I ponder on the narrow house.
I shudder at the thought of men....
I'm due to fall in love again.”
― Dorothy Parker

“If you wear a short enough skirt, the party will come to you.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”
― Dorothy Parker

“So, you're the man who can't spell 'fuck.'"
Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer after publishers had convinced Mailer to replace the word with a euphemism, 'fug,' in his 1948 book, "The Naked and the Dead.”
― Dorothy Parker

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker

“Where's the man that could ease a heart like a satin gown?”
― Dorothy Parker

“The only “ism” Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.”
― Dorothy Parker

“I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem.”
― Dorothy Parker

“The ladies men admire, I've heard,
Would shudder at a wicked word.
Their candle gives a single light,
They'd rather stay at home at night.
They do not keep awake 'till three,
Nor read erotic poetry.
They never sanction the impure,
Nor recognize an overture.
They shrink from powders and from paints...
So far I've had no complaints.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Never complain, never explain.”
― Dorothy Parker

“I'd rather hop freights around the country and cook my food out of tin cans over wood fires, than be rich and have a home or work.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I like it because its ugly”
― Jack Kerouac

“In all this welter of women I still hadn't got one for myself, not that I was trying too hard, but sometimes I felt lonely to see everybody paired off and having a good time and all I did was curl up in my sleeping bag in the rosebushes and sigh and say bah. For me it was just red wine in my mouth and a pile of firewood”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“The trouble with fashions is you want to fuck the women in their fashions but when the time comes they always take them off so they don't get wrinkled.
Face it, the really great fucks in a man's life was when there was no time to take yr clothes off, you were too hot and she was too hot - none of yr Bohemian leisure, this was middleclass explosions against snowbanks, against walls of shithouses in attics, on sudden couches in the lobby -
Talk about yr hot peace.”
― Jack Kerouac, Book of Sketches

“...for in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“No one is ever holy without suffering.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days - such as that day - when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“You can't ever tell what's going to hurt people.”
― Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust

“Soon someone would say the fatal words, "Well, I think it’s time for me to go to bed.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

“Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.”
― Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One

“...she had regained what I thought she had lost forever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, "Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Labels

“What an immature, self-destructive, antiquated mischief is man! How obscure and gross his prancing and chattering on his little stage of evolution! How loathsome and beyond words boring all the thoughts and self-approval of his biological by-product! this half-formed, ill-conditioned body! this erratic, maladjusted mechanism of his soul: on one side the harmonious instincts and balanced responses of the animal, on the other the inflexible purpose of the engine, and between them man, equally alien from the being of Nature and the doing of the machine, the vile becoming!”
― Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

“And what does the rain say at night in a small town, what does the rain have to say? Who walks beneath dripping melancholy branches listening to the rain? Who is there in the rain’s million-needled blurring splash, listening to the grave music of the rain at night, September rain, September rain, so dark and soft? Who is there listening to steady level roaring rain all around, brooding and listening and waiting, in the rain-washed, rain-twinkled dark of night?”
― Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City

“He had never felt anything like that before - yet somehow he knew that from now on he would always feel like that, always, and something caught at his throat as he realized what a strange sad adventure life might get to be, strange and sad and still much more beautiful and amazing than he could ever have imagined because it was so really, strangely sad.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City

“When the railroad trains moaned, and river-winds blew, bringing echoes through the vale, it was as if a wild hum of voices, the dear voices of everybody he had known, were crying: "Peter, Peter! Where are you going, Peter?" And a big soft gust of rain came down.
He put up the collar of his jacket, and bowed his head, and hurried along.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City