A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.
--Peter De Vries
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?
--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
Confession is good for the soul in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff.
--Peter De Vries
Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.
--Peter De Vries
Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.
--Peter De Vries
Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.
--Peter De Vries
I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best- it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money- provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it.
--Peter De Vries
I don't understand why people keep saying marriage is doomed. All of mine worked out.
--Peter De Vries
I wanted to be bored to death, as good a way to go as any.
--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
It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
--Peter De Vries
Let us hope, that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.
--Peter De Vries
Life is a crowded superhighway with bewildering cloverleaf exits on which a man is liable to find himself speeding back in the direction he came.
--Peter De Vries
Life is a zoo in a jungle.
--Peter De Vries
Marriage is a lottery in which men stake their liberty and women their happiness.
--Peter De Vries
Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.
--Peter De Vries
My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that, too.
--Peter De Vries
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
--Peter De Vries
One dreams of the goddess Fame and winds up with the bitch Publicity.
--Peter De Vries
Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.
--Peter De Vries
The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds- they mature slowly.
--Peter De Vries
The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.
--Peter De Vries
The human brain is merely a device to prevent the ears grating on one another.
--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 satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive, and eventually releases him again for another chance.
--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
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.
--Peter De Vries
There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you.
--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
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.
--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
What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.
--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
Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.
--Peter De Vries
Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?
--Peter De Vries
Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.
--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 Noel Cowardice?
--Peter De Vries
You can't be happy with a woman who pronounces both d's in Wednesday.
--Peter De Vries
You can't talk about the serious and the comic separately and still be talking about life, any more than you can independently discuss hydrogen and oxygen and still be talking about water.
--Peter De Vries
Found 40 occurence(s) in 52,059 quotation(s).