Dorothy Parker Quotes

Great drama is the souvenir of the adventure of a master among the pieces of his own soul.

He didn't see me looking at him, but I could tell the ceremony was having the same effect on him. He was enraptured. It was a rare and sweet look for him, reminding me of the tortured artist that lived beneath the sarcasm. I liked that about Adrian—not the tortured part, but the way he could feel so deeply and then transform those emotions into art.

But perhaps my art is the art of a lunatic, I thought, mere glittering quicksilver, a blue soul breaking in upon my pictures.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you

A work of art is like a person: it has more than one soul in its breast.

If people only knew what lies at the heart of my novels! What a tumult of desires these carefully written pages conceal! I sometimes have a loathing for the furious cravings that give me no peace except when I am working.

To be an actor you have to have a certain amount of madness in you. That’s why, when people meet you and you seem very together, they are quite surprised - they don’t see you behind closed doors.

Surely words are just the background music when passion pounces on a soul.

I balance things better and don't kill myself so much, but conflict makes me a more interesting actress to watch. The places I go to pull emotions from, I think if you have a perfect, happy life, you just don't have those places. And I want those places. I'm proud of those places.

What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child. From, The Book of Disquiet

By my physical constitution I am but an ordinary man ... Yet some great events, some cutting expressions, some mean hypocracies, have at times thrown this assemblage of sloth, sleep, and littleness into rage like a lion.

It is as if my heart and my brain did not belong to the same person. Feelings come quicker than lightning and fill my soul, but they bring me no illumination; they burn me and dazzle me.

I held his gaze. I could see the storm in his eyes. I knew he was confused. I could see the fear. Then there was the love. I saw it. The fierceness in his eyes. I believed it. I could see it clearly. But it was too late now. The love wasn't enough. Everyone always said that love was enough. It wasn't. Not when your soul was shattered.

Fight with yourself when you paint, not with the model. A student is one who struggles with himself for order.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears.

My soul is my great asset and my great misfortune.

That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people.

I sometimes find it half a sin, To put to words the grief i feel, For words like nature,half reveal, and half conceal the soul within.

To make great art, you had to expose your soul, and some things should be left safely in the dark.

You have to believe in the arthouse, if you will - the emotion, the conflict, the who am I, which will always be an unanswered question. If you do it right, you have a smaller drama, and a great movie.

There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.

I adore the struggle you carry in yourself. I adore your terrifying sincerity.

I wonder whether my bleak-o-meter is set differently from other people's. I have such passion for what I do that I can't see it as bleak. When people use that word, or “grim” or “gritty,” I just think, “Oh, come on, look a bit deeper.” My films don't give you an easy ride. I can see that. The sense I get is that people have quite a physical experience with them. They feel afterwards that they've really been through something.

After all, the supreme virtue in all art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives art a right to be.