Dorothy Parker Quotes

[Suggesting her epitaph:] This is too deep for me.

I told you I was ill. (On his headstone)

My epitaph? My epitaph will be, 'Curiosity did not kill this cat'.

There's an academic tradition called the 'Last Lecture.' Hypothetically, if you knew you were going to die and you had one last lecture, what would you say to your students? Well, for me, there's an elephant in the room. And the elephant in the room, for me, it wasn't hypothetical.

I preached as never sure to preach again, And as a dying man to dying men.

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

I know what I'm having 'em put on my tombstone: 'I have nothing more to say'.

I often thought my gravestone would say, 'Here lies Gandalf. He came out,'

Once someone asked me, "What do you want to be your epitaph?" So I said, "Paulo Coelho died when he was alive.

[On an epitaph for herself:] Under here, we're all equal.

When they bury me in a church and chuck earth on my grave, I'd like the words 'Well, at least he tried' engraved on my tombstone.

When I die, my epitaph or whatever you call those signs on gravestones is going to read: "I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I didn't like." I am so proud of that I can hardly wait to die so it can be carved. And when you come to my grave you will find me sitting there, proudly reading it.

'Curiosity never killed this cat’ — that’s what I’d like as my epitaph.

Sometimes I wish my first word was 'quote,' so that on my death bed, my last words could be 'end quote.'

The death of Sid Caesar on Wednesday caused a chain reaction in my soon-to-be-66-year-old mind. I was saddened, of course, but felt a sense of relief that he was at last free from the indignity of aging.

Go away. I'm all right. [last words]

I think of death as some delightful journey that I shall take when all my tasks are done.

...there occurred to me the simple epitaph which, when I am no more, I intend to have inscribed on my tombstone. It was this: "He was a man who acted from the best motives. There is one born every minute.

You cannot avoid mortality. But you can choose your way of meeting it. And that is the most that any man can hope for.

Beneath this slab John Brown is stowed. He watched the ads, And not the road.

When my mouth shall be filled with dust, and the worm shall feed, and feed sweetly upon me, when the ambitious man shall have no satisfaction if the poorest alive tread upon him, nor the poorest receive any contentment in being made equal to princes, for they shall be equal but in dust.

If I don't survive," I say, "tell Tobias I didn't want to leave him.

The great majority gave no signs one way or the other; like birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.

I shall die reading; since my book and a grave are so near.