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People rarely do what they don't want to.

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
People
Rarely
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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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Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?
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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What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.
Peter De Vries
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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
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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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The rich aren't like us, they pay less taxes.
Peter De Vries
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A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.
Peter De Vries
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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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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
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All couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.
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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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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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
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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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The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
Peter De Vries
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I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
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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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?
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