Peter De Vries > Quotes

“Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.”
― Peter De Vries

“I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.”
― Peter De Vries

“The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.”
― Peter De Vries

“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, The Blood of the Lamb

“Life is a zoo in a jungle”
― Peter De Vries

“Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.”
― Peter De Vries

“What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning. ”
― Peter De Vries

“Before the mind snaps, or the heart breaks, it gather itself like a clock about to strike. It might even be said one pulls himself together to disintegrate.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.”
― Peter De Vries

“Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of [parenthood] is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.”
― Peter De Vries

“The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.”
― Peter De Vries

“It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.”
― Peter De Vries

“He resented such questions as people do who have thought a great deal about them. The superficial and slipshod have ready answers, but those looking this complex life straight in the eye acquire a wealth of perception so composed of delicately balanced contradictions that they dread, or resent, the call to couch any part of it in a bland generalization. The vanity (if not outrage) of trying to cage this dance of atoms in a single definition may give the weariness of age with the cry of youth for answers the appearance of boredom.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too. ”
― Peter De Vries

“The idea of a Supreme Being who creates a world in which one creature is designed to eat another in order to subsist, and then pass a law saying, "Thou shalt not kill," is so monstrously, immeasurably, bottomlessly absurd that I am at a loss to understand how mankind has entertained or given it house room all this long.”
― Peter De Vries

“We are not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through. ”
― Peter De Vries

“The murals in restaurants are on par with the food in museums.”
― Peter De Vries

“A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetric-ally once, and by car forever after.”
― Peter De Vries

“We live this life by a kind of conspiracy of grace: the common assumption, or pretense, that human existence is 'good' or 'matters' or has 'meaning,' a glaze of charm or humor by which we conceal from one another and perhaps even ourselves the suspicion that it does not, and our conviction in times of trouble that it is overpriced - something to be endured rather than enjoyed.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“life is a zoo in a jungle.”
― Peter De Vries

“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, The Blood of the Lamb