Peter De Vries Quotes

Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.
Peter De Vries
Gluttony is an emotional escape a sign something is eating us.
Peter De Vries
We know the human brain is a device to keep the ears from grating on one another.
Peter De Vries
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination but the combination is locked up in the safe.
Peter De Vries
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination but the combination is locked up in the safe.
Peter De Vries
The rich aren't like us they pay less taxes.
Peter De Vries
Life is a zoo in a jungle.
Peter De Vries
If there's anything I hate it's the word humorist - I feel like countering with the word seriousist.
Peter De Vries
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.
Peter De Vries
Let us hope...that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.
Peter De Vries
There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.
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.
Peter De Vries
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
Peter De Vries
Deep down, he's shallow.
Peter De Vries
But I made an issue of the precise wording of the vows. I wanted liberalized ones, with no outmoded Pauline nonsense exacting from the bride the promise to 'obey' the groom. Here I put my foot down, rather in the manner of a husband determined to show at the outset who was boss. 'I'll have no obedience around here!' I said, banging the table. 'Is that clear?''Is it an order?''Yes.
Peter De Vries
Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.
Peter De Vries
Stein resented the sedative power of religion, or rather the repose available to those blissfully ignorant that the medicament was a fictitious blank. In this exile from peace of mind to which his reason doomed him, he was like an insomniac driven to awaken sleepers from dreams illegitimately won by going around shouting, 'Don't you realize it was a placebo!' Thus it seemed to me that what you were up against in Stein was not logic rampant, but frustrated faith. He could not forgive God for not existing.
Peter De Vries
How I hate this world. I would like to tear it apart with my own two hands if I could. I would like to dismantle the universe star by star, like a treeful of rotten fruit. Nor do I believe in progress. A vermin-eaten saint scratching his filth for heaven is better off than you damned in clean linen. Progress doubles our tenure in a vale of tears. Man is a mistake, to be corrected only by his abolition, which he gives promise of seeing to himself. Oh, let him pass, and leave the earth to the flowers that carpet the earth wherever he explodes his triumphs. Man is inconsolable, thanks to that eternal "Why?" when there is no Why, that question mark twisted like a fishhook in the human heart. "Let there be light," we cry, and only the dawn breaks.
Peter De Vries
The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.
Peter De Vries
I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
Peter De Vries