Peter De Vries Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

Psychoanalysis is a permanent fad. A vogue here to stay because it tells an old story in a new way.

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

Peter De Vries
For the whole thing about matrimony is this: We fall in love with a personality, but we must live with a character.

Peter De Vries
Love is an art. I thought you might notice my craft is ebbing.

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

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

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
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
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 wanted to be bored to death, as good a way to go as any.

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

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

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
There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you.

Peter De Vries
Once a relatively simple dirt road with forks where the traveler had a simple choice, life is now a crowded superhighway with bewildering cloverleaf exits on which, after a maize [sic] of turns, a man is libel [sic] to find himself speeding back in the direction he came.

Peter De Vries
He believed that the art of conversation was dead. His own small talk, at any rate, was bigger than most people's large.

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