128 Quotes by Peter De Vries

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.

Romantic ardor is in basic principle Lethean. Its purpose is temporarily to blind us to one another; make us forget the low esteem in which we really hold one another, and in which we quite deserve to be held; the anesthetic administered to reason without which the race would not go on.

Deep down, he's shallow.

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.

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

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

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.

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.