Quotes from Don Marquis

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

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

Vibrations are the key to everything. Atoms used to be, but atoms have quite gone out.

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.

Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.

my youth i shall never forget but there s nothing i really regret wotthehell wotthehell there s a dance in the old dame yet toujours gai toujours gai

A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimist.

The wand waved; the Adam's Apple leapt, and they were off. What followed cannot be indicated typographically. But if a cat were a sawmill, and a dog were a gigantic cart full of tin cans bouncing through a stone paved street, and that dog and that cat hated each other and were telling each other so, it would sound much like it.

The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.

Prohibition makes you want to cry into your beer and denies you the beer to cry into.

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

Life's too damn funny for me to explain.

One of the most important things to remember about infant care is: don't change diapers in midstream.

The successful people are the ones who think up things for the rest of the world to keep busy at.

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

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

Life is one damned kitten after another." Mehitabel the Alley Cat

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!

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.

There is always a comforting thought in time of trouble when it is not our trouble.

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

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

Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.

A hypocrite is a person who - but who isn't?