Best 70 quotes of Peter De Vries on MyQuotes

Peter De Vries

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    Peter De Vries

    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.

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

    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?

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

    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.

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    Peter De Vries

    Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.

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    Peter De Vries

    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.

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

    Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.

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    Peter De Vries

    Exercise is an unnatural act.

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

    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.

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

    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.

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    Peter De Vries

    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?

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

    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.

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

    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.

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

    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.

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

    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.

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    Peter De Vries

    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.

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    Peter De Vries

    Life is a zoo in a jungle.

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

    Marriage has driven more than one man to sex.

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

    Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

    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.

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    Peter De Vries

    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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    Peter De Vries

    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.

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

    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.

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

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

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    Peter De Vries

    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.