Daily Inspiration Quote by Don Marquis

Marquis slips a tiny grenade of cynicism into the nursery. On the surface, the line is practical slapstick: a diaper change “in midstream” is a predictable mess, the kind of domestic timing error you learn once and never repeat. But the joke’s real aim is adult life, where “infant care” is a decoy for any job involving chaos, dependency, and bodily fluids - politics, bureaucracy, management, even marriage. The humor comes from treating a proverb as a parenting tip, then letting the reader notice the proverb hiding inside the parenting tip.

“Midstream” does double duty: it’s literally urine, and it’s the classic metaphor for ill-timed reform. Marquis, a journalist with a satirist’s ear for how public language flatters itself, shrinks grand rhetoric to an image you can’t romanticize. It’s hard to talk about “bold course corrections” with a squirming baby and a moving target. The line punctures the moral vanity that often accompanies calls for change, suggesting that timing is not a footnote to virtue but the difference between competence and catastrophe.

The subtext is conservative without being doctrinaire: don’t confuse motion with progress, don’t start rearranging systems while they’re actively doing what systems do. Coming from early 20th-century American journalism - an era of Progressive reforms, moral crusades, and institutional churn - the quip reads like newsroom wisdom translated into a kitchen disaster. Marquis doesn’t argue against change; he argues against the self-congratulatory kind that ignores the physics of the moment.