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Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

Peter De Vries

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Peter De Vries
Age: 83 †
Born: 1910
Born: February 27
Died: 1993
Died: September 28
Editor
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Human
Humans
Heart
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Turned
Mark
Question
Pain

More quotes by Peter De Vries

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A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.
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Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?
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The trouble with treating people as equals is that the first thing you know they may be doing the same thing to you.
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I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.
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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.
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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?
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Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.
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Marriage has driven more than one man to sex.
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Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.
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This human nature is shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.
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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.
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Mrs Thicknesse and I agreed that a business of his own was probably the only solution for him because he was obviously unemployable.
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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.
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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.
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People rarely do what they don't want to.
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You ought to be ashamed, a woman in an Easter bonnet told Stein. Your race gave us our religion... From ancient polytheism, the belief in lots of gods, the woman continued a little more eruditely, the Hebrew nation led us on to the idea that there is only one. Which is just a step from the truth, said Stein.
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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
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I suppose I shall marry eventually One does that, one drifts into stability
Peter De Vries
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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
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Sex in marriage is like medicine. Three times a day for the first week. Then once a day for another week. Then once every three or four days till the condition clears up.
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