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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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Peter De Vries
Age: 83 †
Born: 1910
Born: February 27
Died: 1993
Died: September 28
Editor
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Piece
String
Eternity
Bone
Pieces
Strings
Nothing
Riding
Piteous
Guts
Splinter
Stick
Soot
Sticks
Astral
Bones
Splinters

More quotes by Peter De Vries

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All couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.
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It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
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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.
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The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
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The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.
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Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.
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Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.
Peter De Vries
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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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This human nature is shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.
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.
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What we are assigned to bear is in a sense a measure of our stature.
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People rarely do what they don't want to.
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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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Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.
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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.
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There are times when breakfast seems the one thing worth getting up for.
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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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Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.
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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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Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?
Peter De Vries