Peter De Vries Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Peter De Vries
The difference between satire and humor is that the satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive—often to release him again for another chance.

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

Peter De Vries
One dreams of the goddess Fame and winds up with the bitch Publicity.

Peter De Vries
Comedy deals with that portion of our suffering that is exempt from tragedy.

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

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

Peter De Vries
Any suburban mother can state her role sardonically enough in a sentence: it is to deliver children obstetrically once and by car forever after.

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
They made love as though they were an endangered species.

Peter De Vries
Fidelity to large truths often requires betrayal of small ones.

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

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

Peter De Vries
It is a fact universally acknowledged that a husband is the most ridiculous thing on earth, except for a bachelor.

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

Peter De Vries
The entire universe is like a lyre tuned by some excellent artificer, whose strings are separate species of the universal whole.

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
"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
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
"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
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 Noël Cowardice?

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

Peter De Vries
The traditional conflict between flesh and spirit, as viewed by the Christianity now supposedly outmoded, isn't likely to ease up because we have scrapped the notion of sin and now speak instead of the ego and superego between them riding herd on something called the id. It's the same keg of nails any way you open it.

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 until the condition clears up.

Peter De Vries