Best 70 quotes of Peter De Vries on MyQuotes

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.

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?

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

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

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.

Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

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.

Marriage has driven more than one man to sex.

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

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

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

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

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.

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.

Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.

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 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.

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

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

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.

This human nature is shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.

Time heals nothing — which should make us the better able to minister.

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

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.