Peter De Vries (February 27, 1910 – September 28, 1993):
A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.
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?"
Confession is good for the soul in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff.
Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.
Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.
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.
I don't understand why people keep saying marriage is doomed. All of mine worked out.
I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.
It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
Life is a zoo in a jungle.
My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that, too.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds- they mature slowly.
The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.
The murals in restaurants are about on a par with the food in art galleries.
The rich aren't like us; they pay less taxes.
The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive, and eventually releases him again for another chance.
The trouble with treating people as equals is that the first thing you know they may be doing the same thing to you.
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.
The whole thing about matrimony is this: We fall in love with a personality, but we must live with a character.
There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you.
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.
When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.
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.
You can't be happy with a woman who pronounces both d's in Wednesday.
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.
"Once deemed the funniest novelist in America, now all but forgotten."
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