There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.
Dorothy ParkerRead
This living, this living, this living Was never a project of mine.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Life is unpredictable and often not what we plan for.
Dorothy Parker's quote reflects on the often unplanned and chaotic nature of life. It suggests that despite our aspirations and projects, the essence of living may not align with what we consciously set out to achieve, highlighting the spontaneity of human experience and existence.
Themes
LifeExistenceUnpredictabilityChaosPlans
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about embracing life's unexpected turns, I illustrated with Parker's quote.
More from Dorothy Parker
All quotes βMy land is bare of chattering folk; / the clouds are low along the ridges, / and sweet's the air with curly smoke / from all my burning bridges.
Dorothy ParkerRead
Prince or commoner, tenor or bass, Painter or plumber or never-do-well, Do me a favor and shut your face - Poets alone should kiss and tell.
Dorothy ParkerRead
They say of me, and so they should, It's doubtful if I come to good. I see acquaintances and friends Accumulating dividends And making enviable names In science, art and parlor games. But I, despite expert advice, Keep doing things I think are nice, And though to good I never come Inseparable my nose and thumb.
Dorothy ParkerRead
It is that word 'hunny,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.
Dorothy ParkerRead
I canβt write five words but that I change seven.
Dorothy ParkerRead
Similar quotes
There are no conditions to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.
Leo TolstoyRead
There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.
George WillRead
There's a difference between making incremental improvements and making sweeping changes that take you away from your core values.
Tony DungyRead
War don't ennoble men, it turns 'em into dogs. It poisons the soul.
James JonesRead
Death is not a blotting-out of existence, a final escape from life; nor is death the door to immortality. He who has fled his Self in earthly joys will not recapture It amidst the gossamer charms of an astral world. There he merely accumulates finer perceptions and more sensitive responses to the beautiful and the good, which are one. It is on the anvil of this gross earth that struggling man must hammer out the imperishable gold of spiritual identity.
Paramahansa YoganandaRead
Observation is so wide awake, and facts are being so rapidly added to the sum of human experience, that it appears as if the theorizer would always be in arrears, and were doomed forever to arrive at imperfect conclusion; but the power to perceive a law is equally rare in all ages of the world, and depends but little on the number of facts observed.
Henry David ThoreauRead