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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
Grew
Came
Lasts
Generalizations
Last
Generalization
Write
Exquisite
Writing
Discouraged
Good
Worse
Tried

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Marriage has driven more than one man to sex.
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I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
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The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
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What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.
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Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?
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Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.
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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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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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What we are assigned to bear is in a sense a measure of our stature.
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I wondered whether any woman could be happy with a man who says 'folderol'.
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A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.
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Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.
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Are you pro- or anti-macassar?
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People rarely do what they don't want to.
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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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Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.
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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.
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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.
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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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I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.
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