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The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.

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
Locked
Combination
Safe
Universe
Science
Nature
Like
World
Astronomy

More quotes by Peter De Vries

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Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.
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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.
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The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
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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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This human nature is shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.
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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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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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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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A politician is a man who can be verbose in fewer words than anyone else.
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... it is a fact universally acknowledged that a husband is the most ridiculous thing on earth, except for a bachelor.
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All couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.
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Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.
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The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.
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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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I wondered whether any woman could be happy with a man who says 'folderol'.
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Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?
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Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.
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What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.
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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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We are nothing but a string of gut on a stick of bone riding this piece of astral soot for one piteous splinter of eternity.
Peter De Vries