Don Marquis Quotes

it wont be long now it wont be long man is making deserts of the earth it wont be long now before man will have used it up so that nothing but ants and centipedes and scorpions can find a living on it man has oppressed us for a million years but he goes on steadily cutting the ground from under his own feet making deserts deserts deserts

The best good that you can possibly achieve is not good enough if you have to strain yourself all the time to reach it. A thing is only worth doing, and doing again and again, if you can do it rather easily, and get some joy out of it. Do the best you can, without straining yourself too much and too continuously, and leave the rest to God. If you strain yourself too much you'll have to ask God to patch you up. And for all you know, patching you up may take time that it was planned to use some other way. BUT . . . overstrain yourself now and then. For this reason: The things you create easily and joyously will not continue to come easily and joyously unless you yourself are getting bigger all the time. And when you overstrain yourself you are assisting in the creation of a new self — if you get what we mean.

no insect likes human beings and if you think you can see why the only reason i tolerate you is because you seem less human to me than most of them

demons and fishhooks
he exclaimed
i am losing my personal
identity as a worm
my individuality
is melting away from me
odds craw i am becoming
part and parcel of
this bloody robin
so help me i am thinking
like a robin and not
like a worm any
longer yes yes i even
find myself agreeing
that a robin must live
i still do not
understand with my mentality
why a robin must live
and yet i swoon into a condition of belief

i
have often noticed that
ancestors never boast the descendants who boast
of ancestors i would
rather start a family than one blood will tell but often
it tells too much

dance mehitabel dance
caper and shake a leg
what little blood is left
will fizz like wine in a keg

a robin said to an
angleworm as he ate him
i am sorry but a bird
has to live somehow the
worm being slow witted could
not gather his
dissent into a wise crack
and retort he was
effectually swallowed
before he could turn
a phrase

The individual aspiration is always defeated of its perfect fruition and expression, but it is never lost; it passes into the conglomerate being of the race. The way to encourage yourself about the human race is to look at it first from a distance; look at the lights on the high spots.

a little more
conversation revealed
that warty bliggens considers himself to be
the center of the said
universe
the earth exists to grow toadstools for him
to sit under
the sun to give him light
by day and the moon
and wheeling constellations
to make beautiful
the night for the sake of
warty bliggens

No matter how nearly perfect an Almost Perfect State may be, it is not nearly enough perfect unless the individuals who compose it can, somewhere between death and birth, have a perfectly corking time for a few years. The most wonderful governmental system in the world does not attract us, as a system; we are after a system that scarcely knows it is a system; the great thing is to have the largest number of individuals as happy as may be, for a little while at least, some time before they die.

amen said a beetle who had
preceded him into the interior that is the way i
feel myself is it not
wonderful when one arrives at the place
where he can give up his
ambitions and resignedly
nay even with gladness
recognize that it is a far
far better thing to be merged harmoniously
in the cosmic all
and this confortable situation
in his midst
so affected the marauding robin that he perched
upon a blooming twig
and sang until the
blossoms shook with ecstacy
he sang
i have a good digestion
and there is a god after all
which i was wicked enough to doubt
yesterday when it rained'''

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

there are more things
twixt the vermiform appendix
and nirvana than are dreamt of
in thy philosophy horatio

i asked him
why is it that you are so greatly favored
ask rather
said warty bliggens
what the universe
has done to deserve me

I have noticed that when chickens quit quarreling over their food they often find that there is enough for all of them i wonder if it might not be the same with the human race