Quote

Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?

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
Awfulness
Families
Popular
Starting
Another
Reason

More quotes by 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
Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.
Peter De Vries
Image
All couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.
Peter De Vries
Image
What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.
Peter De Vries
Image
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
Image
I wondered whether any woman could be happy with a man who says 'folderol'.
Peter De Vries
Image
I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
Peter De Vries
Image
Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.
Peter De Vries
Image
There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.
Peter De Vries
Image
The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.
Peter De Vries
Image
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
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
Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.
Peter De Vries
Image
There are times when breakfast seems the one thing worth getting up for.
Peter De Vries
Image
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
Image
My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.
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
The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
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
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.
Peter De Vries