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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
Action
People
Rarely

More quotes by 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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What we are assigned to bear is in a sense a measure of our stature.
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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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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I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
Peter De Vries
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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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Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.
Peter De Vries
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What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.
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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The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
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 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 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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Marriage has driven more than one man to sex.
Peter De Vries
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I wondered whether any woman could be happy with a man who says 'folderol'.
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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Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.
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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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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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