Quotes by Peter De Vries

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

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

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

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

“The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.”

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

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

“Life is a zoo in a jungle.”

“Anyone informed that the universe is expanding and contracting in pulsations of eighty billion years has a right to ask, Whats in it for me?”

I love being a writer. What I cant stand is the paperwork.

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.

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.

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, Dont 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.

Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.

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. Ill have no obedience around here! I said, banging the table. Is that clear?Is it an order?Yes.

Deep down, hes shallow.

Nostalgia aint what it used to be.

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.

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

Let us hope...that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.