Don Marquis Quotes

“A certain alloy of expediency improves the gold of morality and makes it wear all the longer.”

“A demagogue is a person with whom we disagree as to which gang should mismanage the country.”

“A great many people who spend their time mourning over the brevity of life could make it seem longer if they did a little more work.”

“A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.”

“A sequel is an admission that you've been reduced to imitating yourself.”

“An old stomach reforms more whiskey drinkers than a new resolve.”

“An optimist is a man who has never had much experience.”

“Between the years of ninety-two and a hundred and two, however, we shall be the ribald, useless, drunken, outcast person we have always wished to be. We shall have a long white beard and long white hair; we shall not walk at all, but recline in a wheel chair and bellow for alcoholic beverages; in the winter we shall sit before the fire with our feet in a bucket of hot water, a decanter of corn whiskey near at hand, and write ribald songs against organized society. We look forward to a disreputable, vigorous, unhonoured, and disorderly old age.
”

“Bores bore each other too; but it never seems to teach them anything.”

“By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before he orders, there is little else about him worth knowing.”

“Censors are necessary, increasingly necessary, if America is to avoid having a vital literature.”

“Every cloud has its silver lining but it is sometimes a little difficult to get it to the mint.”

“Fishing: a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in old clothes.”

“Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.”

“He worked like hell in the country so he could live in the city, where he worked like hell so he could live in the country.”

“Honesty is a good thing, but it is not profitable to its possessor unless it is kept under control.”

“I do not see why men should be so proud. Insects have the more ancient lineage according to the scientists. Insects were insects when man was only a burbling whatsit.”

“I get up in the morning with an idea for a three-volume novel and by nightfall it's a paragraph in my column.”

“I have often noticed that ancestors never boast of the descendants who boast of ancestors. I would rather start a family than finish one. Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.”

“I love you as New Englanders love pie!”

“I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well.”

“I once heard the survivors of a colony of ants that had been partially obliterated by a cow's foot seriously debating the intention of the gods towards their civilization.”

“I would rather start a family than finish one.”

“Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.”

“If a child shows himself to be incorrigible, he should be decently and quietly beheaded at the age of twelve, lest he grow to maturity, marry, and perpetuate his kind.”

“If the world were not so full of people, and most of them did not have to work so hard, there would be more time for them to get out and lie on the grass, and there would be more grass for them to lie on.”

“If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you.”

“If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.”

“In all systems of theology the devil figures as a male person. Yes, it is women who keep the church going.”

“In order to influence a child, one must be careful not to be that child's parent or grandparent.”