Quote

This human nature is shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.

Peter De Vries

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Peter De Vries
Age: 83 †
Born: 1910
Born: February 27
Died: 1993
Died: September 28
Editor
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Humans
Shabby
Introspection
Irony
Stuff
Nature
May
Human

More quotes by Peter De Vries

Image
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
Image
Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?
Peter De Vries
Image
The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
Peter De Vries
Image
Are you pro- or anti-macassar?
Peter De Vries
Image
I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
Peter De Vries
Image
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.
Peter De Vries
Image
What we are assigned to bear is in a sense a measure of our stature.
Peter De Vries
Image
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.
Peter De Vries
Image
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.
Peter De Vries
Image
People rarely do what they don't want to.
Peter De Vries
Image
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
Image
Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.
Peter De Vries
Image
I wondered whether any woman could be happy with a man who says 'folderol'.
Peter De Vries
Image
Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.
Peter De Vries
Image
I think people love each other a little more than they hate each other ... Love has a slim hold on the human corporation, like fifty-one per cent, but it's enough.
Peter De Vries
Image
What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.
Peter De Vries
Image
Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.
Peter De Vries
Image
Mrs Thicknesse and I agreed that a business of his own was probably the only solution for him because he was obviously unemployable.
Peter De Vries
Image
My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.
Peter De Vries
Image
It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
Peter De Vries