Peter De Vries Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be. — Peter De Vries

What people believe is a measure of what they suffer. — 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. — 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

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

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

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

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

I believe that man must learn to live without those consolations called religious, which is own intelligence must by now have told him belong to the childhood of the race. Philosophy can really give us nothing permanent to believe either; it is too rich in answers, each canceling out the rest. The quest for Meaning is foredoomed. Human life 'means' nothing. But this is not to say that it is not worth living. What does a Debussy Arabesque 'mean,' or a rainbow or a rose? A man delights in all of these, knowing himself to be no more
a wisp of music and a haze of dreams dissolving against the sun. Man has only his own two feet to stand on, his own human trinity to see him through: Reason, Courage, and Grace. And the first plus the second equals the third. — 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. — Peter De Vries

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

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

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

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

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

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

Write drunk; edit sober. — 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. — Peter De Vries

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

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

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. — Peter De Vries

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

I wanted to be bored to death, as good a way to go as any. — 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. — Peter De Vries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Italia sat belching under a pair of oval-framed photographs of parents hairier, if possible, than himself. His wife was dead, but there was a picture of her, too, in her casket, gazing out at us with an eerie simulacrum of motherly love. Dark-complected Mr. Italia was indeed, with handle-bar mustaches of a size that might have made him topple forward out of his chair were it not for the posture seemingly aimed at correcting the leverage in his favor. He drank beer after thrusting into my hand a bottle of soda pop of marked but unidentifiable flavor, pale yellow in color, and lukewarm. — Peter De Vries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life is a zoo in a jungle — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Peter De Vries

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

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. — Peter De Vries

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

It might even be said one pulls himself together to disintegrate. The scattered particles of self - love, wood thrush calling, homework sums, broken nerves, rag dolls, one Phi Betta Kappa key, gold stars, lamplight smiles, night cries, and the shambles of contemplation - are collected for a split moment like scraps of shrapnel before they explode. — Peter De Vries

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

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

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

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

Dead drunk and cold-sober, he wandered out into the garden in the cool of the evening, awaiting the coming of the Lord. — 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. — Peter De Vries

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

"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

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

Marriage has driven more than one man to sex. — Peter De Vries

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

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. — Peter De Vries

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. — Peter De Vries

The murals in restaurants are on par with the food in museums. — Peter De Vries

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

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

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

"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

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. — Peter De Vries

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

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

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. — Peter De Vries

Exercise is an unnatural act. — 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. — Peter De Vries

Deep down, he's shallow. — Peter De Vries