Daily Inspiration Quote by Don Marquis

Happiness, in Don Marquis's hands, isn’t a glowing destination; it’s a gap in the weather. Calling it an "interval" demotes joy from a moral achievement to a scheduling detail, a brief recess between the next two storms. That choice of word matters: an interval is measurable, finite, almost clinical. It suggests that unhappiness is the default state, the baseline hum of modern life, and that happiness is what happens when the machinery temporarily stops grinding.

Marquis wrote as a journalist in an America accelerating into mass urbanization, industrial routine, and the jittery new tempo of the early 20th century. In that context, the line reads like a deadpan corrective to the era’s booming optimism and self-improvement gospel. It punctures the idea that happiness is something you can permanently secure if you just buy the right product, adopt the right attitude, or perform the right kind of respectability. He’s not preaching despair so much as refusing to sell consolation.

The subtext is a sly, humane permission slip: if happiness is intermittent, you’re not failing when it fades. By framing joy as temporary, he also makes it more legible - something you can notice, even cherish, precisely because it isn’t guaranteed. The cynicism lands because it’s disciplined, not melodramatic: one spare sentence that treats emotion like time, and time like the only authority that never negotiates.