Peter De Vries famous quotes

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

#Life #Morning #Inspiration

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

#Love #Marriage #Fall

Life is a zoo in a jungle.
-- Peter De Vries

#Life #Zoos #Bad Day

Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.
-- Peter De Vries

#Inspirational #Motivational #Food

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
-- Peter De Vries

#Work #Writing #Paperwork

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

#Funny #Mom #Mother

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
-- Peter De Vries

#Inspirational #Marriage #Children

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

#God #Fear #Order

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.
-- Peter De Vries

#Writing #Drunk #Discipline

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

#Relationship #Anniversary #Marriage

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.
-- Peter De Vries

#Ideas #People #Despair

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

#Funny #Summer #School

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

#Nature #Science #World

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.
-- Peter De Vries

#Loss #Order #Law

Look at it this way: Psychoanalysis is a permanent fad.
-- Peter De Vries

#Psychoanalysis

We know the human brain is a device to keep the ears from grating on one another.
-- Peter De Vries

#Brain #Ears #Devices

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?
-- Peter De Vries

#Years #Expanding #Billions

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

#Kissing #Brain #Rubber

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.
-- Peter De Vries

#Brother #Sibling #Men

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

#Couple #Bears #Intimacy

Exercise is an unnatural act.
-- Peter De Vries

#Exercise

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

#Hate #Humor #Feels

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.
-- Peter De Vries

#Love #Hate #Thinking

Man is vile, I know, but people are wonderful.
-- Peter De Vries

#Men #People #Wonderful

Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.
-- Peter De Vries

#Cookies #Shapes #Diction

When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.
-- Peter De Vries

#Home #Thinking #Broken

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

#Men #Politics #Politician

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.
-- Peter De Vries

#Stars #Joy #May

Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.
-- Peter De Vries

#Pain #Heart #Mark

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

#Laughter #Humor #Another Chance

We are not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through.
-- Peter De Vries

#Sports #Earth

Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.
-- Peter De Vries

#Hate #Hate Me

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

#Family #Children #Humorous

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.
-- Peter De Vries

#Soul #Tweed #Coats

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
-- Peter De Vries

#Past #Nostalgia #Used

Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.
-- Peter De Vries

#May #Stuff #Irony

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.
-- Peter De Vries

#Heart #Mind #Together

What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.
-- Peter De Vries

#Believe #People #Suffering

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.
-- Peter De Vries

#Eye #Vanity #Giving

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

#Father #Hate #Waiting

I suppose I shall marry eventually One does that, one drifts into stability
-- Peter De Vries

#Marriage #Doe #Stability

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

#Marriage #Husband #Earth

There are times when breakfast seems the one thing worth getting up for ...
-- Peter De Vries

#Morning #Breakfast

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

#Entrepreneur #Solutions

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.
-- Peter De Vries

#Punishment #Waste #Delay

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

#People #May #Firsts

Time heals nothing-which should make us better able to minister.
-- Peter De Vries

#Time #Able #Ministers

I wondered whether any woman could be happy with a man who says 'folderol'.
-- Peter De Vries

#Men

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?
-- Peter De Vries

#Real #Drawing #Issues

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.
-- Peter De Vries

#Years #Letters #Today

"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."
-- Peter De Vries

#Children #Believe #Atheism

"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.
-- Peter De Vries

#Easter #Race #Ideas

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.
-- Peter De Vries

#Writing #Lasts #Discouraged

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.
-- Peter De Vries

#Eye #Track #Shrinking

The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.
-- Peter De Vries

#Tubas #Instruments

Try the Lamentations of Jeremiah. They always pick me up.
-- Peter De Vries

#Pick Me Up #Trying #Despair

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.
-- Peter De Vries

#Country #Ivy #League

Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?
-- Peter De Vries

#Reason #Starting

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

#Pairs #Miserable #Mankind

People rarely do what they don't want to.
-- Peter De Vries

#People #Want #Action

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

#Believe #Astrology #Astronomy

We pay for security with boredom, for adventure with bother.
-- Peter De Vries

#Adventure #Boredom #Pay

Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.
-- Peter De Vries

#Art #Food #Museums

Are you pro- or anti-macassar?
-- Peter De Vries

#Design

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?
-- Peter De Vries

#Mother #Father #Kitchen

What we are assigned to bear is in a sense a measure of our stature.
-- Peter De Vries

#Bears

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.
-- Peter De Vries

#Funny Life #Men #Exit

Every novel should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
-- Peter De Vries

#Writing #Middle #Should

The writer can only explore the inner space of his characters by perceptively navigating his own.
-- Peter De Vries

#Character #Space

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.
-- Peter De Vries

#God #Kind #Providence

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

#True Love #Love One Another #Enough

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.
-- Peter De Vries

#Sex #Medicine #Funny Marriage

The rich aren't like us, they pay less taxes.
-- Peter De Vries

#Pay #Rich #Taxes

Love's blindness consists oftener in seeing what is not there than in seeing what is.
-- Peter De Vries

#Love #What Is Love #Blindness

Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.
-- Peter De Vries

#Self #Abuse #Celibacy