Peter De Vries Quotes - Page 3

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?

Do you believe in astrology? -I don't even believe in astronomy.

Exercise is an unnatural act.

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

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

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.

The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.

"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."

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

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.

Try the Lamentations of Jeremiah. They always pick me up.

If there's anything I hate it's the word humorist-I feel like countering with the word seriousist.

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.

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

People rarely do what they don't want to.

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

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

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?

Are you pro- or anti-macassar?

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?

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.

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

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.

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.