Dorothy Parker Quotes

Then she told herself to stop her nonsense. If you looked for things to make you feel hurt and wretched and unnecessary, you were certain to find them, more easily each time, so easily, soon, that you did not even realize you had gone out searching. Women alone often developed into experts at the practice. She must never join their dismal league.

Self-pity in its early stage is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.

Only self-hatred could lead him to ruin himself because his heart was "broken.

No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished.

He wanted this someone to see how much he hurt.

Why are you doing this to yourself? When something bad happens, why do you have to pick at it until it bleeds all over again?

If you're not careful, you can fall into a destructive cycle of self-pity.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

I know so many people who are eaten up by regret. It manifests itself in so many ways. They either become mentally a bit off, or they get very fat, or they are just horribly depressed.

Guilt is cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It's a black wall. It's a thief.

Love hurts, love scars, love wounds, and mars.

I try not to go down the 'what if' road very often. It isn't fruitful and just makes you feel crummy.

I feel hurt and pain times a million, all the time.

Spare yourselves from the indulgence of self-pity. It is always self-defeating. Subdue the negative and emphasize the positive.

I think cruelty is just loneliness disguised as bitterness.

There isn't a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart.

Pain in the present is experienced as hurt. Pain in the past is remembered as anger. Pain in the future is perceived as anxiety. Unexpressed anger, redirected against yourself and held within, is called guilt. The depletion of energy that occurs when anger is redirected inward creates depression.

What you said hurt me very much. I cried all the way to the bank.

If you allow your mind to carp at all and sundry, it will turn against itself: the majority of our sorrows are self-inflicted.

Emotion in itself is not unhappiness. Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness

The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance.

Thoughts can hurt like real pain.

There is a stage in any misery when the victim begins to find a deep satisfaction in it.

At this moment I am feeling disappointed with myself and I am hurt and numb...

When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.