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
Bores bore each other too; but it never seems to teach them anything.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Boredom, Bores
Some persons are likable in spite of their unswerving integrity.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Honesty
An idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe it.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Ideas
A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Pessimism
The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Humanity
Adolescence is certainly far from a uniformly pleasant period. Early manhood might be the most glorious time of all were it not that the sheer excess of life and vigor gets a fellow into continual scrapes.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Youth
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: Aspirations, Goals
Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Happiness
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
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: Happiness, Boredom
There is nothing so habit-forming as money.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Money
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
Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Poetry
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
Persian pussy from over the sea demure and lazy and smug and fat none of your ribbons and bells for me ours is the zest of the alley cat
—Don Marquis
Topics: Cats
prohibition makes you want to cry into your beer and denies you the beer to cry into
—Don Marquis
Topics: Drinking
Honesty is a good thing, but it is not profitable to its possessor unless it is kept under control.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Honesty
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
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him whose?
—Don Marquis
Topics: Work, Funny quotes, Hard Work, Wealth
Punctuality is one of the cardinal business virtues: always insist on it in your subordinates.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Punctuality
In order to influence a child, one must be careful not to be that child’s parent or grandparent.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Parenting, Parents
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: Journalism, Journalists
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 law can make you quit drinking; but it can’t make you quit being the kind that needs a law to make you quit drinking.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Law
Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Reason, Instincts
This is another day! Are its eyes blurred With maudlin grief for any wasted past? A thousand thousand failures shall not daunt! Let dust clasp dust, death, death; I am alive.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Blessings, Repentance, Regret, Remorse
Every cloud has its silver lining but it is sometimes a little difficult to get it to the mint
—Don Marquis
Topics: Difficulty, Difficulties
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
If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.
—Don Marquis
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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