The Blood of the Lamb Quotes

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“How I hate this world. I would like to tear it apart with my own two hands if I could. I would like to dismantle the universe star by star, like a treeful of rotten fruit. Nor do I believe in progress. A vermin-eaten saint scratching his filth for heaven is better off than you damned in clean linen. Progress doubles our tenure in a vale of tears. Man is a mistake, to be corrected only by his abolition, which he gives promise of seeing to himself. Oh, let him pass, and leave the earth to the flowers that carpet the earth wherever he explodes his triumphs. Man is inconsolable, thanks to that eternal "Why?" when there is no Why, that question mark twisted like a fishhook in the human heart. "Let there be light," we cry, and only the dawn breaks.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“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

“Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“The greatest experience open to man then is the recovery of the commonplace. Coffee in the morning and whiskeys in the evening again without fear. Books to read without that shadow falling across the page.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“But I made an issue of the precise wording of the vows. I wanted liberalized ones, with no outmoded Pauline nonsense exacting from the bride the promise to 'obey' the groom. Here I put my foot down, rather in the manner of a husband determined to show at the outset who was boss. 'I'll have no obedience around here!' I said, banging the table. 'Is that clear?'
'Is it an order?'
'Yes.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“It might even be said one pulls himself together to disintegrate. The scattered particles of self - love, wood thrush calling, homework sums, broken nerves, rag dolls, one Phi Betta Kappa key, gold stars, lamplight smiles, night cries, and the shambles of contemplation - are collected for a split moment like scraps of shrapnel before they explode.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“You believe what you must in order to stave off the conviction that it's all a tale told by an idiot”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“I believe that man must learn to live without those consolations called religious, which is own intelligence must by now have told him belong to the childhood of the race. Philosophy can really give us nothing permanent to believe either; it is too rich in answers, each canceling out the rest. The quest for Meaning is foredoomed. Human life 'means' nothing. But this is not to say that it is not worth living. What does a Debussy Arabesque 'mean,' or a rainbow or a rose? A man delights in all of these, knowing himself to be no more--a wisp of music and a haze of dreams dissolving against the sun. Man has only his own two feet to stand on, his own human trinity to see him through: Reason, Courage, and Grace. And the first plus the second equals the third.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“Stein resented the sedative power of religion, or rather the repose available to those blissfully ignorant that the medicament was a fictitious blank. In this exile from peace of mind to which his reason doomed him, he was like an insomniac driven to awaken sleepers from dreams illegitimately won by going around shouting, 'Don't you realize it was a placebo!' Thus it seemed to me that what you were up against in Stein was not logic rampant, but frustrated faith. He could not forgive God for not existing.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“So we were back in the Children's Pavilion, and there was again the familiar scene: the mothers with their nearly dead, the false face of mercy, the Slaughter of the Innocents.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“I believe that man must learn to live without those consolations called religious, which his own intelligence must by now have told him belong to the childhood of the race.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds – they mature slowly”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“Dead drunk and cold-sober, he wandered out into the garden in the cool of the evening, awaiting the coming of the Lord.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“He resented such questions as people 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.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“Do you pray for me?”

“Well, that would mean the one I was addressing had done this to you to begin with, which I find hard to believe anybody would.”

“I don’t quite follow you.”

“I simply mean that asking Him to cure you - or me, or anybody - implies a personal being who arbitrarily does us this dirt. The prayer then is a plea to have a heart. To knock it off. I find the thought repulsive. I prefer thinking we’re the victims of chance to dignifying any such force with the name of Providence.”

“We’re supposed to deserve it,” she said, poking about in a box of cookies which my mother had baked and sent me, and which I had passed along to Rena.

“Not you.”

“I’m a sinner.”

“Stop giving yourself airs. You’re beginning to sound like Cora.”

“What would you do if you were God?”

“Put a stop to all this theology.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“no era tanto su lógica aplastante como su fe frustrada: no podía perdonarle a Dios que no existiera.”
― Peter De Vries, La sangre del cordero (Ficciones)

“La búsqueda de sentido está condenada al fracaso de antemano porque la vida no tiene “sentido”, pero eso no significa que no valga la pena vivirla.”
― Peter De Vries, La sangre del cordero (Ficciones)

“Fue entonces cuando descubrí que la experiencia más sublime que quepa imaginar es la restauración de la cotidianidad.”
― Peter De Vries, La sangre del cordero (Ficciones)

“There is a point when life, having showered us with jewels for nothing, begins to exact our life's blood for paste.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“One summer when Carol was attending day camp, Greta had an affair with a man named Mel Carter. He was an Eastern publicity representative for a film studio, and often instructed dinner parties to which we went in those days with accounts of the movies' coming of age. 'We have a picture coming up,' he said once, 'in which a character says "son of a bitch." Lots of exciting things are happening. Still, it's only a beginning. Much remains to be done.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“Mr. Italia sat belching under a pair of oval-framed photographs of parents hairier, if possible, than himself. His wife was dead, but there was a picture of her, too, in her casket, gazing out at us with an eerie simulacrum of motherly love. Dark-complected Mr. Italia was indeed, with handle-bar mustaches of a size that might have made him topple forward out of his chair were it not for the posture seemingly aimed at correcting the leverage in his favor. He drank beer after thrusting into my hand a bottle of soda pop of marked but unidentifiable flavor, pale yellow in color, and lukewarm.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“I am not impressed by big words,' said my uncle, who was always ready enough to bandy 'predestination' and 'infralapsarianism.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“Could any of these things be happening because they're fallen women?' I asked, drawing on another of the cliches we were given like a quiverful of arrows with which to face a life cursed by sin.

Doc sat a moment with his hand on the door handle before getting out. 'Well now, it's interesting that you ask. I had a woman recently who fell, not just one flight of stairs, but two. She had a baby as perfect as a pool ball.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“Progress doubles our tenure in a vale of tears.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“The superficial and the 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.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb