Don Marquis

“ Perhaps, in these quarter-hours of rest between dashes lies a certain safety. For none of its rushes ever carries through; it always saves itself from logical arrival at a logical terminus; it turns with a kind of horror from any possible partnership with the absolute; when it dashes again, it will dash in some other direction, and its new dash will bear no perceptible relation to its former dash and no relation to what it was supposed to be thinking about in the interval between the dashes. ”

“ I do not pretend to say, especially since the war, where the world is going, but it gets sudden urgent impulses to be rapidly on its way; it has spasms of the most disconcerting speed, and then it stops, puts its hands in its pockets, sits down on a park bench, and stares at the toes of its shoes. ”

“ These fits and starts of humanity, these rushings and stoppings, may, for all I know, correspond to some vast internal rhythm of the cosmos; the pulse jumps, and the corpuscles shoot ahead. Personally, I prefer the dreamy, more stationary moments between pulse-beats; I don't want to go anywhere in particular badly enough to hurry; effort is loathsome. ”

“ I prefer them, on the whole, to any other sort of animal; I always feel a clannish instinct to defend them; as between human beings and, let us say, camels, or even gazelles, I do not hesitate an instant. ”

“ It does the best it can. And thrice ten thousand vers libre bards and philosophers, every year, gibe at it with bitterness and contumely. It never answers. Sometimes we think its dull and plodding patience is almost grand. ”

“ A man who is late for an engagement owes the engagee a lie which is not only plausible, but entertaining. But the story that goes with being forty minutes late will not do at all when you are twenty minutes late. I wished to know in advance the sort of story I should have to tell. ”