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
Usually
Sentence
Longer
Serving
Started
Arguing
Went
Precious
Hours
Sentences
Epigrams
Rather
Punishment
Delay
Without
Hour
Somewhat
Time
Waste
Paradox

More quotes by 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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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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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
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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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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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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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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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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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All couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.
Peter De Vries
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People rarely do what they don't want to.
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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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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Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.
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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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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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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Are you pro- or anti-macassar?
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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Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.
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