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
That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.
Interpretation
This quote humorously reflects on the tendency to make choices contrary to one's better judgment.
Dorothy Parker's quote reveals a witty perspective on the human condition, suggesting that life often involves decisions that defy our better instincts. It captures the inner conflict many face between rational thought and impulsive action, indicating that even in retrospect, one might acknowledge how these choices led them to their current state.
In practice
In a speech about embracing our flaws, you might use this quote to illustrate the human condition.
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.
My 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.
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.
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.
It is that word 'hunny,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.
I canβt write five words but that I change seven.
To unfold the secret laws and relations of those high faculties of thought by which all beyond the merely perceptive knowledge of the world and of ourselves is attained or matured, is a object which does not stand in need of commendation to a rational mind.
I have always been ahead of my time.
It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.
Some dreams we have are nothing else but dreams, Unnatural and full of contradictions; Yet others of our most romantic schemes, Are something more than fictions.
All human things Of dearest value hang on slender strings.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.