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
If wild my breast and sore my pride, I bask in dreams of suicide, If cool my heart and high my head I think 'How lucky are the dead.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the contrasts between despair and contentment in the face of mortality.
Dorothy Parker's quote captures the complex emotions surrounding life and death. It expresses a sense of turmoil and pride when dealing with painful feelings, while also presenting a romanticized sorrowful contemplation of death, suggesting that those who have passed might be at peace compared to the struggles of the living. The juxtaposition of suffering and the serene acceptance of death denotes a profound philosophical inquiry into existence and the human psyche.
Themes
LifeDeathDespairMortalitySuffering
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about mental health awareness at a community event.
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
A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.
E. B. WhiteRead
Dreams are the touchstones of our character.
Henry David ThoreauRead
Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
Toni MorrisonRead
Anarcho-syndic alism took for granted that working people ought to control their own work, its conditions, the enterprises in which they work, along with communities, so they should be associated with one another in free associations, and democracy of that kind should be the foundational elements of a more general free society.
Noam ChomskyRead
We try to organize the world, which isn't organized the way our brains want to organize it. We tell stories about the people in our lives, we project ideas onto them. We project relationships with people, we make our lives into stories. I don't think we can avoid doing that.
Charlie KaufmanRead
I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.
A. E. HousmanRead