Quote

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

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Peter De Vries
Age: 83 †
Born: 1910
Born: February 27
Died: 1993
Died: September 28
Editor
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Sentence
Usually
Serving
Longer
Arguing
Started
Precious
Went
Sentences
Epigrams
Hours
Punishment
Delay
Rather
Hour
Somewhat
Without
Paradox
Time
Waste

More quotes by 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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A politician is a man who can be verbose in fewer words than anyone else.
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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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
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What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.
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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There are times when breakfast seems the one thing worth getting up for.
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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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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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 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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Do you believe in astrology? -I don't even believe in astronomy.
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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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 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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I wondered whether any woman could be happy with a man who says 'folderol'.
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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The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
Peter De Vries