Peter De Vries Quotes

While I was now fairly demoralized, as well as aflame with the prospect of an hour in his daughter's arms, the thought of using his car to debauch his bourgeois paradise was a perfidy at which I drew the line.

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.

Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?

So we were back in the Children's Pavilion, and there was again the familiar scene: the mothers with their nearly dead, the false face of mercy, the Slaughter of the Innocents.

I once tried drowning my sorrows, till I found out they could swim.

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

One summer when Carol was attending day camp, Greta had an affair with a man named Mel Carter. He was an Eastern publicity representative for a film studio, and often instructed dinner parties to which we went in those days with accounts of the movies' coming of age. 'We have a picture coming up,' he said once, 'in which a character says "son of a bitch." Lots of exciting things are happening. Still, it's only a beginning. Much remains to be done.

"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."

A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetric-ally 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The superficial and the 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.

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.

The feeling for words comes at an early age--or rather it is lost in most cases at any early age, leaving the rest poets" (170).

You believe what you must in order to stave off the conviction that it's all a tale told by an idiot

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

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.

Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.

We live this life by a kind of conspiracy of grace: the common assumption, or pretense, that human existence is 'good' or 'matters' or has 'meaning,' a glaze of charm or humor by which we conceal from one another and perhaps even ourselves the suspicion that it does not, and our conviction in times of trouble that it is overpriced - something to be endured rather than enjoyed.

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

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

Could any of these things be happening because they're fallen women?' I asked, drawing on another of the cliches we were given like a quiverful of arrows with which to face a life cursed by sin.
Doc sat a moment with his hand on the door handle before getting out. 'Well now, it's interesting that you ask. I had a woman recently who feel, not just one flight of stairs, but two. She had a baby as perfect as a pool ball.

The greatest experience open to man then is the recovery of the commonplace. Coffee in the morning and whiskeys in the evening again without fear. Books to read without that shadow falling across the page.

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.

"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.

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 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.

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

Exercise is an unnatural act.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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?

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

Every novel should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

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.

I am not impressed by big words,' said my uncle, who was always read enough to bandy 'predestination' and 'infralapsarianism.

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

Deep down, he's shallow.

A man has to believe in something, and I believe I'll have another drink.

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.

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

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

There is a point when life, having showered us with jewels for nothing, begins to exact our life's blood for paste.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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