Marrying a man is like buying something you’ve been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn’t always go with everything else in the house.
Jean Kerr (1922-2003) American author and playwright [b. Bridget Jean Collins]
“The Ten Worst Things about a Man,” The Snake Has All the Lines (1960)
Quotations by:
Kerr, Jean
JEFF: Man is the only animal that learns by being hypocritical. He pretends to be polite and then, eventually, he becomes polite.
Jean Kerr (1922-2003) American author and playwright [b. Bridget Jean Collins]
Finishing Touches, Act 1 (1973)
(Source)
Being divorced is like being hit by a Mack truck. If you live through it, you start looking very carefully to the right and to the left.
Jean Kerr (1922-2003) American author and playwright [b. Bridget Jean Collins]
Mary, Mary, ch. 1 (1960)
SYDNEY: You don’t seem to realize that a poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help.
Jean Kerr (1922-2003) American author and playwright [b. Bridget Jean Collins]
Poor Richard, Act 1 (1965)
SYDNEY: Even though a number of people have tried, no one has yet found a way to drink for a living.
Jean Kerr (1922-2003) American author and playwright [b. Bridget Jean Collins]
Poor Richard, Act 1 (1965)
You don’t seem to realize that a poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help. I tell you there is no despair like the despair of the man who has everything.
Jean Kerr (1922-2003) American author and playwright [b. Bridget Jean Collins]
Poor Richard, Act 1 [Sydney] (1963)
(Source)
Oftentimes, in the evening after they have finished spreading the fertilizer, the writer and his wife sit on the fence — with a wonderful sense of “togetherness” — and listen to the magic symphony of the crickets.
I can understand that. Around our house, we’re pretty busy, and of course we’re not the least bit integrated, but nevertheless my husband and I often sit together in the deepening twilight and listen to the sweet, gentle slosh-click, slosh-click of the dishwasher. He smiles and I smile. Oh, it’s a golden moment.
In the beginning, we made the usual mistake of looking at houses we could afford. I am working on a proposition, hereafter to be known as Kerr’s law, which states in essence: All the houses you can afford to buy are depressing.
Children are different — mentally, physically, spiritually, quantitatively, qualitatively; and furthermore, they’re all a little bit nuts.
If you have formed the habit of checking on every new diet that comes along, you will find that, mercifully, they all blur together, leaving you with only one definite piece of information: french-fried potatoes are out.
The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old.
Jean Kerr (1922-2003) American author and playwright [b. Bridget Jean Collins]
Essay (1957), “How to Get the Best of Your Children,” Please Don’t Eat the Daisies
(Source)
Original magazine publication unknown.
Dearer to me than the evening star
A Packard car
A Hershey bar
Or a bride in her rich adorning
Dearer than any of these by far
Is to lie in bed in the morning.Jean Kerr (1922-2003) American author and playwright [b. Bridget Jean Collins]
Essay (1957), “Introduction,” Please Don’t Eat the Daisies
(Source)
You can’t sleep until noon with the proper élan unless you have some legitimate reason for staying up until three (parties don’t count).
Jean Kerr (1922-2003) American author and playwright [b. Bridget Jean Collins]
Essay (1957), “Introduction,” Please Don’t Eat the Daisies
(Source)
Now the thing about having a baby — and I can’t be the first person to have noticed this — is that thereafter you have it.
Jean Kerr (1922-2003) American author and playwright [b. Bridget Jean Collins]
Essay (1957), “Introduction,” Please Don’t Eat the Daisies
(Source)
I do have a compulsion to read in out-of-the-way places, and it is often a blessing; on the other hand, it sometimes comes between me and what I tell the children is “my work.” As a matter of fact, I will read anything rather than work. And I don’t mean interesting things like the yellow section of the telephone book or the enclosures that come with the Bloomingdale bill about McKettrick classics in sizes 12 to 20, blue, brown, or navy @ 12.95 (by the way, did you know that colored facial tissue is now on sale at the unbelievably low price of 7.85 a carton? ). The truth is that, rather than put a word on paper, I will spend a whole half hour reading the label on a milk-of-magnesia bottle. “Philips’ Milk of Magnesia,” I read with the absolute absorption of someone just stumbling on Congreve, “is prepared only by the Charles H. Philips Co., division of Sterling Drug, Inc. Not to be used when abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, or other symptoms of appendicitis are present, etc.”
Jean Kerr (1922-2003) American author and playwright [b. Bridget Jean Collins]
Essay (1957), “Introduction,” Please Don’t Eat the Daisies
(Source)
An actor can remember his briefest notice well into senescence and long after he has forgotten his phone number and where he lives.
Jean Kerr (1922-2003) American author and playwright [b. Bridget Jean Collins]
Essay (1957), “One Half of Two on the Aisle,” Please Don’t Eat the Daisies
(Source)
No earlier magazine publication found.
While in some quarters it is felt that the critic is just a necessary evil, most serious-minded, decent, talented theater people agree that the critic is an unnecessary evil.
Jean Kerr (1922-2003) American author and playwright [b. Bridget Jean Collins]
Essay (1957), “One Half of Two on the Aisle,” Please Don’t Eat the Daisies
(Source)
No earlier magazine publication found.
We are being very careful with our children. They’ll never have to pay a psychiatrist twenty-five dollars an hour to find out why we rejected them. We’ll tell them why we rejected them. Because they’re impossible, that’s why.
Jean Kerr (1922-2003) American author and playwright [b. Bridget Jean Collins]
Essay (1957), “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies,” Please Don’t Eat the Daisies
(Source)
I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me that they are wonderful things for other people to go on.
Jean Kerr (1922-2003) American author and playwright [b. Bridget Jean Collins]
Essay (1960-02), “Air Travel Is Definitely Not for Me,” McCall’s Magazine, Vol. 87, No. 6
(Source)
Collected as "Go, Josephine in Your Flying Machine," in The Snake Has All the Lines (1960).
I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas? Personally, I find that it’s work, work, work just trying to keep this top half inch in shape.
The most important thing about me is that I am a Catholic. It’s a superstructure within which you can work, like a sonnet.
Jean Kerr (1922-2003) American author and playwright [b. Bridget Jean Collins]
Interview, Time (14 Apr 1961)