Peter de Vries

He was a lot like those Currier and Ives prints which, having outgrown them, one then laps the field of Sensibility to approach again from behind and see as “wonderful.”

He advised people to have intellect, and to look beneath what he called “the epithelium of things,” though he did discourage scrutiny of his own motives.

I suppose I shall marry eventually. One does that, one drifts into stability.

We turned on one another deep, drowned gazes, and exchanged a kiss that reduced my bones to rubber and my brain to gruel.

All couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.

Try the Lamentations of Jeremiah. They always pick me up.

Are you pro- or anti-macassar?

I can still hear my mother wailing over some new kitchen crisis, “Oh God,” and my father answering cozily from the silo, “Were you calling me, dear?"

I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.

I wanted to be bored to death, as good a way to go as any.

There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The difference between satire and humor is that the satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive— often to release him again for another chance.

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

Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.

It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.