Peter De Vries Quotes

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

"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."

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?

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

Are you pro- or anti-macassar?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Exercise is an unnatural act.

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.

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

People rarely do what they don't want to.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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

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

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.

Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.