Dolly Parton Quotes

Be the alligator girl. Be whatever your dreams and your luck will let you be. Wear your green cornflakes with pride. Snarl at the crowds, and do your best to make them flinch. Give them a quarter's worth of wonder.

I think of country radio like a great lover: you were nice to me, you gave me a lot of cool stuff, and then you dumped my ass for another woman.

My daddy has a chain five miles long, on each link a heart for a lover he has lost.

My coat of many colors that my mama made for me,
Made only from rags, but I wore it so proudly.
Now I know we had no money, but I was rich as I could be.
In my coat of many colors my mama made for me.
Made just for me.

I tried every diet in the book. I tried some that weren’t in the book. I tried eating the book. It tasted better than most of the diets. I tried the Scarsdale diet and the Stillman water diet (you remember that one, where you run weight off trying to get to the bathroom). I tried Optifast, Juicefast, and Waterfast. I even took those shots that I think were made from cow pee. I endured every form of torture anybody with a white coat and a clipboard could devise for a girl who really liked fried pork chops.
One night while I was on some kind of liquid-protein diet made from bone marrow, or something equally appetizing, I was with a group of friends at a Howard Johnson’s and some of them were having fried clams. I’ll never forget sitting there with all of that glorious fried fat filling my nostrils and feeling completely left out. I went home and wrote one of my biggest hits, “Two Doors Down.” I also went off my diet and had some fried clams.
There were times when I thought of chucking it all in. “Damn the movie,” I would say. “I’m just gonna eat everything and go ahead and weigh five hundred pounds and have to be buried in a piano case.” Luckily, a few doughnuts later, that thought would pass and I would be back to the goal at hand. I remember something in a book I read called Gentle Eating. The author said you should pretend the angels are eating with you and that you want to save some for them. I loved that idea, because I love angels. I have to admit, though, there were times I would slap those angels out of the way and have their part too. A true hog will do that.

Fate granted some people their wildest, greatest wishes while leaving the simplest pleas of others unanswered.

I think it’s so important to instill in children to have faith and to know there are great things out there. Greatness is out there, greatness you can tap into. But it has to start from in your heart.

Because books, my friends, are true magic bound between two covers.

It's like a battery that has to have a positive and a negative. One doesn't work without the other. You've gotta have the good and the bad in order to know what's right, and in order to know what's real and what ain't.

That day on the set, after talking to Carl, she came over to me and asked, “What did Carl mean when he said that you’re an angel?” I didn’t know what he had said, but I was naturally dying to hear more. Jane went on, “I was telling him how sweet you are and how easy you are to work with, and he said, ‘Well, she’s an angel.’ I kinda laughed and said, ‘Yeah, she is.’ But he looked me right in the eye and said, ‘No, you don’t get it. She’s a real angel.’”
I was flattered and honored that Carl thought that. It’s just like him to say it to somebody else, figuring I’ll never hear about it.

If you try to follow everyone else and be like everyone else, before you know it you’re gone. You’re not going to find yourself again; you’ll just be a version of what you might have hoped to have been.

When a girl didn’t have anyone to stand up for her, that girl had to stand up for her own damn self.

The way I see it, you've gotta put up with the rain to get a rainbow.

She cared so much about her words, her creative expression, when what mattered to everyone else was the bottom line. Everything was a business — even art. She'd written the songs, but she wouldn't be able to truly own them. Not if she wanted the rest of the world to hear them.

It would be better to have a new enemy, wouldn’t it, instead of an old one? The demons of the past were the hardest to slay.