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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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Peter De Vries
Age: 83 †
Born: 1910
Born: February 27
Died: 1993
Died: September 28
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Chicago
Illinois
Shapes
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Fashioned
Somewhat
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Turned
Cutter

More quotes by 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 we are assigned to bear is in a sense a measure of our stature.
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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There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.
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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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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A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.
Peter De Vries
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What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.
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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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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Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.
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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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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All couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.
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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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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Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?
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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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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Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.
Peter De Vries