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.
It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.
War: A by-product of the arts of peace.
The sage does not act and therefore does not fail, does not seize and therefore does not lose.
If a man cannot be a Christian in the place where he is, he cannot be a Christian anywhere.
Bread has been made (indifferent) from potatoes;_x000D_ _x000D_ And galvanism has set some corpses grinning,_x000D_ _x000D_ But has not answer'd like the apparatus_x000D_ _x000D_ Of the Humane Society's beginning,_x000D_ _x000D_ By which men are unsuffocated gratis:_x000D_ _x000D_ What wondrous new machines have late been spinning.
What has been cut apart cannot be glued back together. Abandon all hope of totality, future as well as past, you who enter the world of fluid modernity.
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