Don Marquis Quotes

So many times, I have a speech ready but no dice. Always a bridesmaid, never a mother.

Everyone's a millionaire where promises are concerned.

Regret is a short, evocative and achingly beautiful word: an elegy to lost possibilities even in its brief annunciation.

These people who do not get enough sex are always tring to stop the people who do.

To all who leaned upon Mr. Gladstone, who trusted him, and hoped for something from him—chips, nothing but chips—hard, dry, unnourishing, indigestible chips.

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.

In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.

After all is said and done, more is said than done.

Television has been the single greatest shaper of emptiness.

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.

The curse of the romantic is a greed for dreams, an intensity of expectation that, in the end, diminishes the reality.

All the praise I received couldn't substitute for the praise I had never received from my mother at home. I longed for some wonderful man to come and save me from my life - but there didn't seem to be any, at least not for me.

Men mourn for what they have lost; women for what they ain't got.

Life isn't what it's like in the movies.

Ambition is a Dead Sea fruit, and the greatest peril to the soul is that one is likely to get precisely what he is seeking.

It's a source of great sadness to me that my father died without having seen me do anything worthwhile. He was constantly having to make excuses for me.

People of this world are deluded. They're always longing for something - always, in a word, seeking.

I don't get all the women that I want... I get all the women that want me.

I have had young fascinations but never love.

The story of a passionate woman in a stale marriage is as old as Helen of Troy.

Well, California used to be in the dream-making business, and unfortunately what's happened I think we're now in the dream-breaking business.

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

It is always best and safest to count on nothing from America but words.

American government has seemed to mean naught but impotence and unavailing words.

Bill Clinton’s promises have the life span of a Big Mac on Air Force One.