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
Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Poetry
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
Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Age, Aging
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
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.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Work
Every cloud has its silver lining but it is sometimes a little difficult to get it to the mint
—Don Marquis
Topics: Difficulty, Difficulties
Bores bore each other too; but it never seems to teach them anything.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Boredom, Bores
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: Remorse, Repentance, Regret, Blessings
Fishing is a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in old clothes.
—Don Marquis
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
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
Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Time, Procrastination
Some persons are likable in spite of their unswerving integrity.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Honesty
Friends, I beg you do not shirk your daily task of indolence.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Relaxation
Honesty is a good thing, but it is not profitable to its possessor unless it is kept under control.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Honesty
Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.
—Don Marquis
There is nothing so habit-forming as money.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Money
Fate often puts all the material for happiness and prosperity into a man’s hands just to see how miserable he can make himself with them.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Fate, Unhappiness, Happiness
Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Politics, Politicians
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Poetry
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
Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Instincts, Reason
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 chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Humanity
When you can’t have anything else, you can have virtue.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Virtue
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
I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing
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: Ancestors, Inheritance
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
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
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
prohibition makes you want to cry into your beer and denies you the beer to cry into
—Don Marquis
Topics: Drinking
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
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
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.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Writing
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him whose?
—Don Marquis
Topics: Funny quotes, Work, Wealth, Hard Work
In order to influence a child, one must be careful not to be that child’s parent or grandparent.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Parenting, Parents
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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