Top 80 Quotes & Sayings by Peter De Vries - Page 2

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.

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

Are you pro- or anti-macassar?

Man is vile, I know, but people are wonderful.

Mrs Thicknesse and I agreed that a business of his own was probably the only solution for him because he was obviously unemployable.

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.

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?

... it is a fact universally acknowledged that a husband is the most ridiculous thing on earth, except for a bachelor.

"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."

Exercise is an unnatural act.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

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?

We must love one another, yes, yes, that's all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other. It may be the very recognition of all men as our brothers that accounts for the sibling rivalry, and even enmity, we have toward so many of them.

People rarely do what they don't want to.

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.