Quote

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

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
Sticks
Astral
Bones
Splinters
Piece
String
Eternity
Bone
Pieces
Strings
Nothing
Riding
Piteous
Guts
Splinter
Stick
Soot

More quotes by Peter De Vries

Image
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
Image
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.
Peter De Vries
Image
It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
Peter De Vries
Image
This human nature is shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.
Peter De Vries
Image
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
Image
All couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.
Peter De Vries
Image
The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.
Peter De Vries
Image
What we are assigned to bear is in a sense a measure of our stature.
Peter De Vries
Image
What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.
Peter De Vries
Image
Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?
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
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
Image
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
Image
There are times when breakfast seems the one thing worth getting up for.
Peter De Vries
Image
There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.
Peter De Vries
Image
The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
Peter De Vries
Image
Do you believe in astrology? -I don't even believe in astronomy.
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
Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.
Peter De Vries
Image
... it is a fact universally acknowledged that a husband is the most ridiculous thing on earth, except for a bachelor.
Peter De Vries