Peter De Vries quotes:

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  • The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds - they mature slowly.

  • The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.

  • The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.

  • Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff - it is a palliative rather than a remedy.

  • Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.

  • We must love one another, yes, yes, that's all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other. It may be the very recognition of all men as our brothers that accounts for the sibling rivalry, and even enmity, we have toward so many of them.

  • Life is a zoo in a jungle.

  • Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.

  • The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

  • Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.

  • My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.

  • A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.

  • It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

  • There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.

  • The murals in restaurants are on par with the food in museums.

  • You can make a sordid thing sound like a brilliant drawing-room comedy. Probably a fear we have of facing up to the real issues. Could you say we were guilty of Noel Cowardice?

  • Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

  • I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.

  • Try the Lamentations of Jeremiah. They always pick me up.

  • I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.

  • Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.

  • "You ought to be ashamed," a woman in an Easter bonnet told Stein. "Your race gave us our religion..." "From ancient polytheism, the belief in lots of gods," the woman continued a little more eruditely, "the Hebrew nation led us on to the idea that there is only one." "Which is just a step from the truth," said Stein.

  • I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best -- it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money -- provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it.

  • The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.

  • The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.

  • The rich aren't like us, they pay less taxes.

  • We know the human brain is a device to keep the ears from grating on one another.

  • Every novel should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

  • What baffles me is the comfort people find in the idea that somebody dealt this mess. Blind and meaningless chance seems to me so much more congenial - or at least less horrible. Prove to me that there is a God and I will really begin to despair.

  • ... it is a fact universally acknowledged that a husband is the most ridiculous thing on earth, except for a bachelor.

  • Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff - it is a palliative rather than a remedy

  • Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse

  • The idea of a Supreme Being who creates a world in which one creature is designed to eat another in order to subsist, and then pass a law saying, Thou shalt not kill, is so monstrously, immeasurably, bottomlessly absurd that I am at a loss to understand how mankind has entertained or given it house room all this long.

  • We must love one another, yes, yes, that's all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other.

  • Let us hope, that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.

  • A hundred years ago Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter was given an A for adultery; today she would rate no better than a C-plus.

  • We are nothing but a string of gut on a stick of bone riding this piece of astral soot for one piteous splinter of eternity.

  • Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

  • Time heals nothing-which should make us better able to minister.

  • The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.

  • Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

  • "You don't believe in God," I said to Stein. "God is a word banging around in the human nervous system. He exists about as much as Santa Claus." "Santa Claus has had a tremendous influence, exist or not." "For children." "Lots of saints have died for God with a courage that's hardly childish." "That's part of the horror. It's all a fantasy. It's all for nothing."

  • A politician is a man who can be verbose in fewer words than anyone else.

  • All couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.

  • Anyone informed that the universe is expanding and contracting in pulsations of eighty billion years has a right to ask. What's in it for me?

  • Are you pro- or anti-macassar?

  • Before the mind snaps, or the heart breaks, it gather itself like a clock about to strike. It might even be said one pulls himself together to disintegrate.

  • Do you believe in astrology? -I don't even believe in astronomy.

  • Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.

  • Exercise is an unnatural act.

  • He resented such questions as people do who have thought a great deal about them. The superficial and slipshod have ready answers, but those looking this complex life straight in the eye acquire a wealth of perception so composed of delicately balanced contradictions that they dread, or resent, the call to couch any part of it in a bland generalization. The vanity (if not outrage) of trying to cage this dance of atoms in a single definition may give the weariness of age with the cry of youth for answers the appearance of boredom.

  • How do you expect mankind to be happy in pairs when it is miserable separately?

  • Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.

  • I can still hear my mother wailing over some new kitchen crisis, "Oh God," and my father answering cozily from the silo, "Were you calling me, dear?

  • I made a tentative conclusion. It seemed from all of this that uppermost among human joys is the negative one of restoration: not going to the stars, but learning that one may stay where one is.

  • I suppose I shall marry eventually One does that, one drifts into stability

  • I think people love each other a little more than they hate each other ... Love has a slim hold on the human corporation, like fifty-one per cent, but it's enough.

  • I tried to write worse but it was no good; my generalizations came out as before, each more exquisite than the last. I grew discouraged.

  • I wondered whether any woman could be happy with a man who says 'folderol'.

  • If there's anything I hate it's the word humorist-I feel like countering with the word seriousist.

  • Let us hope, I prayed, that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.

  • Life is a crowded superhighway with bewildering cloverleaf exits on which a man is liable to find himself speeding back in the direction he came.

  • Look at it this way: Psychoanalysis is a permanent fad.

  • Love's blindness consists oftener in seeing what is not there than in seeing what is.

  • Man is vile, I know, but people are wonderful.

  • Marriage has driven more than one man to sex.

  • Mrs Thicknesse and I agreed that a business of his own was probably the only solution for him because he was obviously unemployable.

  • People rarely do what they don't want to.

  • Rather than waste precious time arguing, I went up and started serving my "sentence" without delay. It was usually about an hour for epigrams; somewhat longer for a paradox.

  • The idea of a Supreme Being who creates a world in which one creature is designed to eat another in order to subsist, and then pass a law saying, "Thou shalt not kill," is so monstrously, immeasurably, bottomlessly absurd that I am at a loss to understand how mankind has entertained or given it house room all this long.

  • The trouble with treating people as equals is that the first thing you know they may be doing the same thing to you.

  • The writer can only explore the inner space of his characters by perceptively navigating his own.

  • There are times when breakfast seems the one thing worth getting up for ...

  • We are not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through.

  • We pay for security with boredom, for adventure with bother.

  • We turned on one another deep, drowned gazes, and exchanged a kiss that reduced my bones to rubber and my brain to gruel.

  • What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.

  • What we are assigned to bear is in a sense a measure of our stature.

  • When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.

  • When I see a paragraph shrinking under my eyes like a strip of bacon in a skillet, I know I'm on the right track.

  • Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?

  • I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.

  • Sex in marriage is like medicine. Three times a day for the first week. Then once a day for another week. Then once every three or four days till the condition clears up.

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