Peter De Vries Quotes

There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.

The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.

A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.

The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds - they mature slowly.

Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

A hundred years ago Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter was given an A for adultery; today she would rate no better than a C-plus.

My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.

Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.

We are not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through.

The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.

Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff - it is a palliative rather than a remedy.

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.

Life is a crowded superhighway with bewildering cloverleaf exits on which a man is liable to find himself speeding back in the direction he came.

We know the human brain is a device to keep the ears from grating on one another.

I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

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.

Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.

The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.

Let us hope, that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.

The rich aren't like us, they pay less taxes.

We all learn by experience but some of us have to go to summer school.

Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

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?

When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.