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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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Peter De Vries
Age: 83 †
Born: 1910
Born: February 27
Died: 1993
Died: September 28
Editor
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Tried
Grew
Came
Lasts
Generalizations
Last
Generalization
Write
Exquisite
Writing
Discouraged
Good
Worse

More quotes by Peter De Vries

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This human nature is shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.
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What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.
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The rich aren't like us, they pay less taxes.
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It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
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A politician is a man who can be verbose in fewer words than anyone else.
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The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
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I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.
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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.
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All couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.
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My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.
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Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.
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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.
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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.
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The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?
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I suppose I shall marry eventually One does that, one drifts into stability
Peter De Vries