"Some people have such a talent for making the best of a bad situation that they go around creating bad situations so they can make the best of them." -- Jean Kerr
Jean Kerr (July 10, 1922 – January 5, 2003) was an American author and playwright born in Scranton, Pennsylvania and best known for her humorous bestseller, Please Don't Eat the Daisies, and the plays King of Hearts and Mary, Mary. She was married to drama critic Walter Kerr and was the mother of six children.
"A lawyer is never entirely comfortable with a friendly divorce, anymore than a good mortician wants to finish his job and then have the patient sit up on the table.""A man speaks only when driven to speech by something outside himself - like, for instance, he can't find any clean socks.""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.""Do you know how helpless you feel if you have a full cup of coffee in your hand and you start to sneeze?""Even though a number of people have tried, no one has ever found a way to drink for a living.""Hope is the feeling that the feeling you have isn't permanent.""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.""I make mistakes; I'll be the second to admit it.""I think success has no rules, but you can learn a great deal from failure.""I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being skin deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?""If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it's just possible you haven't grasped the situation.""Man is the only animal that learns by being hypocritical. He pretends to be polite and then, eventually, he becomes polite.""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.""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.""One of the most difficult things to contend with in a hospital is that assumption on the part of the staff that because you have lost your gall bladder you have also lost your mind.""The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible.""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.""When the grandmothers of today hear the word "Chippendales," they don't necessary think of chairs.""Women speak because they wish to speak, whereas a man speaks only when driven to speak by something outside himself like, for instance, he can't find any clean socks.""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."
Born Bridget Jean Collins in Scranton, Pennsylvania to Tom and Kitty Collins, Kerr grew up on Electric Street in Scranton, and attended Marywood Seminary, the topic of her humorous short story "When I was Queen of the May." She received a Bachelor's Degree from Marywood College in Scranton and later attended The Catholic University of America, where she received her Masters' Degree and met then-professor Walter Kerr. She later married Kerr, who went on to become a well-known New York drama critic, and they had six children—Christopher, twins Colin and John, Gilbert, Gregory, and Kitty. The Kerrs bought a home in New Rochelle, New York, where Jean wrote 'King of Hearts', before settling in Larchmont. The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, April 12, 1954 She died in White Plains, New York, of pneumonia, in 2003.
With her husband, Kerr wrote Goldilocks (1958), a short-lived Broadway musical comedy about the early days of silent film. She wrote several highly successful plays, including the Tony Award-winning King of Hearts, as well as the comedy Mary, Mary, which ran for over 1,500 performances and, for a time, held the record for the longest-running non-musical play on Broadway.
She also wrote many humorous magazine essays, typically about her family. Several collections of these were later published in book form and became best-sellers. Her best-known book was Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1957), a humorous look at suburban life from the point of view of former city dwellers. The book was a national bestseller, later adapted for the screen as a vehicle for Doris Day and David Niven and subsequently the basis of a television situation comedy starring Pat Crowley.
