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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
Fashioned
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More quotes by 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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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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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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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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A politician is a man who can be verbose in fewer words than anyone else.
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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This human nature is shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.
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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Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?
Peter De Vries
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Marriage has driven more than one man to sex.
Peter De Vries
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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.
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 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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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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What we are assigned to bear is in a sense a measure of our stature.
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 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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What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.
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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There are times when breakfast seems the one thing worth getting up for.
Peter De Vries