Donald Robert Perry Marquis (1878–1937) was an American humorist, journalist, novelist, poet, cartoonist, and playwright. He was most famous for creating the characters “Archy” the cockroach and “Mehitabel” the cat.
Born in Walnut, Illinois, and educated at Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois, Marquis had a varied career as a journalist and wrote serious plays and poems. He became noted as a humorist through his columns, “The Sun Dial” in the New York Sun and “The Lantern” in the New York Tribune.
Marquis became a celebrity as a comic writer with The Old Soak’s History of the World (1924.) The Old Soak was also adapted into a hit Broadway play (1922–23,) a silent movie (1926,) and a talkie (1937.)
Marquis’s archy and mehitabel (1927) and archys life of mehitabel (1933) follow the fortunes of Archy the cockroach and Mehitabel, an alley cat. Archy was a former poet who cannot reach the typewriter’s shift key so everything he wrote was in lower case. Mehitabel’s morals are questionable, and she claims that she was Cleopatra a former life.
Among Marquis also published collections of humorous poetry, satirical prose, and plays. His other notable works are Danny’s Own Story (1912,) Dreams and Dust (1915,) The Dark Hours (1924,) and Out of the Sea (1927.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Don Marquis
prohibition makes you want to cry into your beer and denies you the beer to cry into
—Don Marquis
Topics: Drinking
A fierce unrest seethes at the core, of all existing things:, it was the eager wish to soar, that gave the gods their wings.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Satisfaction
An optimist is a man who has never had much experience.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Experience, Optimism
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.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Age
I do not think anyone can be taught anything about humor, but I do think that certain persons may be taught the mechanism of producing humorous copy that will sell to magazines and newspapers.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Humor
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him whose?
—Don Marquis
Topics: Work, Wealth, Hard Work, Funny quotes
Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.
—Don Marquis
A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Pessimism
Infancy isn’t what it is cracked up to be. Children, not knowing that they are having an easy time, have a good many hard times. Growing and learning and obeying the rules of their elders, or fighting against them, are not easy things to do.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Children
Some persons are likable in spite of their unswerving integrity.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Honesty
I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
There is nothing we like to see so much as the gleam of pleasure in a person’s eye when he feels that we have sympathized with him, understood him, interested ourself in his welfare. At these moments something fine and spiritual passes between two friends. These moments are the moments worth living.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Friendship
As the skull of a man grows broader, so do his creeds. And his gods they are shaped in his image and mirror his needs. And he clothes them with thunders and beauty, he clothes them with music and fire, seeing not, as he bows by their altars, that he worships his own desire.
—Don Marquis
I get up in the morning with an idea for a three-volume novel and by nightfall it’s a paragraph in my column.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Journalists, Journalism
Successful people are the ones who think up things for the rest of the world to keep busy at.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Success, Success & Failure
The goal of all civilization, all religious thought, and all that sort of thing is simply to have a good time. But man gets so solemn over the process that he forgets the end.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Goals, Aspirations
Bores bore each other too; but it never seems to teach them anything.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Bores, Boredom
When you can’t have anything else, you can have virtue.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Virtue
We pay for the mistakes of our ancestors, and it seems only fair that they should leave us the money to pay with.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Inheritance, Ancestors
a man thinks he amounts to a great deal but to a flea or a mosquito a human being is merely something good to eat
—Don Marquis
It is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Boredom, Happiness
Punctuality is one of the cardinal business virtues: always insist on it in your subordinates.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Punctuality
Man cannot be uplifted; he must be seduced into virtue.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Virtue
Happiness comes fleetingly now and then to those who have learned to do without it and to them only.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Happiness
Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Poetry
An idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe it.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Ideas
Science has always been too dignified to invent a good backscratcher.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Science
Ours is a world where people don’t know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Success & Failure
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Poetry
Of middle age the best that can be said is that a middle-aged person has likely learned how to have a little fun in spite of his troubles.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Aging
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