She often vented her contempt for pretension and self-importance on Clare Boothe Luce, and their encounters produced two famous Parkerisms: When told that Mrs. Luce was always kind to her inferiors, Mrs. Parker asked, “Where does she find them?” On another occasion the two women arrived simultaneously at the door of a nightclub. “Age before beauty,” was all Mrs. Luce could muster.
“And pearls before swine,” said Mrs. Parker as she glided through the doorway.
Her husband, Alan Campbell, had just died, and as his body was being removed from the house, a female acquaintance asked Dorothy if there was anything she could do. “Get me a new husband,” she replied.
“Why, that’s the most callous, disgusting remark I’ve ever heard,” the woman said.
Mrs. Parker turned to her and said quietly, “Okay, then run down to the corner and get me a ham and cheese on rye and tell them to hold the mayo.”
When a woman told her, “I really can’t come to your party, I can’t bear fools,” Mrs. Parker answered, “That’s strange, your mother could.”
On being told that President Calvin Coolidge had just died, she remarked, “How could they tell?”
She is credited with saying at a party, “One more drink and I’ll be under the host.”
On hearing that a British actress who was notorious for her numerous love affairs had broken her leg, Mrs. Parker quipped, “She must have done it sliding down a barrister.”
Oscar Levant once asked her if she took sleeping pills, and she replied, “In a big bowl with sugar and cream.”
She was confined in an oxygen tent after one of several suicide attempts but was sufficiently in possession of herself to ask, “May I have a flag for my tent?”
She was hospitalized for alcoholism, and her doctor told her that she would be dead in a month if she did not stop drinking. She looked up at him and whispered, “Promises, promises.”