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I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.

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
Thinking
Summer
Humor
Funny
Learn
Experience
School

More quotes by Peter De Vries

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Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.
Peter De Vries
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What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.
Peter De Vries
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My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.
Peter De Vries
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The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.
Peter De Vries
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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 tried to write worse but it was no good my generalizations came out as before, each more exquisite than the last. I grew discouraged.
Peter De Vries
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... it is a fact universally acknowledged that a husband is the most ridiculous thing on earth, except for a bachelor.
Peter De Vries
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Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.
Peter De Vries
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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.
Peter De Vries
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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.
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.
Peter De Vries
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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.
Peter De Vries
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Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.
Peter De Vries
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Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.
Peter De Vries
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The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
Peter De Vries
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Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.
Peter De Vries
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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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It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
Peter De Vries
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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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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.
Peter De Vries