Quote

Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.

Peter De Vries

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Peter De Vries
Age: 83 †
Born: 1910
Born: February 27
Died: 1993
Died: September 28
Editor
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Shapes
Diction
Words
Cutters
Like
Cookie
Cookies
Fashioned
Somewhat
Precise
Turned
Cutter

More quotes by Peter De Vries

Image
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
Image
A politician is a man who can be verbose in fewer words than anyone else.
Peter De Vries
Image
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
Image
There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.
Peter De Vries
Image
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
Image
Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.
Peter De Vries
Image
People rarely do what they don't want to.
Peter De Vries
Image
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
Image
A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.
Peter De Vries
Image
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
Image
My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.
Peter De Vries
Image
All couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.
Peter De Vries
Image
I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.
Peter De Vries
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.
Peter De Vries
Image
What we are assigned to bear is in a sense a measure of our stature.
Peter De Vries
Image
I suppose I shall marry eventually One does that, one drifts into stability
Peter De Vries
Image
I wondered whether any woman could be happy with a man who says 'folderol'.
Peter De Vries
Image
Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.
Peter De Vries