Daily Inspiration Quote by Don Marquis

A good Marquis line lands like a polite smile with a razor behind it. "I would rather start a family than finish one" borrows the warm, aspirational glow of domesticity, then pivots on the verb that turns the room cold. "Start" carries the American promise: youth, possibility, the social script of settling down. "Finish" yanks that script into its shadow ledger: inheritance fights, caregiving, funerals, the slow administrative work of love when it stops being photogenic.

Marquis was a journalist with a satirist's ear for what public virtue sounds like when it’s trying too hard. The joke is built on ambiguity and timing. "Finish one" can mean completing the project of family life, but it also hints at ending it, even destroying it. That double meaning is the engine: he isn't confessing violence so much as exposing how easily our sentimental language can be flipped into something predatory. It's a one-line critique of the way "family values" rhetoric often fetishizes beginnings (weddings, babies, origin stories) while treating endings (divorce, death, estrangement) as failures best kept offstage.

The subtext is less anti-family than anti-myth. Marquis is mocking the cultural preference for romance over responsibility, for starting narratives over sustaining them. In a period when the family was marketed as both moral unit and social insurance policy, the line pricks the balloon: the hardest part of family is not making it, but living through it to the bitter, bureaucratic, unavoidable end.