Quotes from Peter De Vries

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The murals in restaurants are on par with the food in museums.

Deep down, he's shallow.

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.

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.

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.

I once tried drowning my sorrows, till I found out they could swim.

You believe what you must in order to stave off the conviction that it's all a tale told by an idiot

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

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

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.

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.

A man has to believe in something, and I believe I'll have another drink.

The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.

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.

The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds – they mature slowly

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.

He was absurd, but then who isn't.

Indeed, the more void the universe may be of meaning, the more precious the lanterns by which man picks his little way through it.