Quotes by Peter Vries

• Let us hope, that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.
• Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
• 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.
• Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.
• I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
• I wanted to be bored to death, as good a way to go as any.
• I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.
• Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.
• It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
• The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.
• Life is a zoo in a jungle.
• I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.
• The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
• Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.
• Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
• When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.
• We must love one another, yes, yes, that's all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other.
• The murals in restaurants are on par with the food in museums.
• There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.
• The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds - they mature slowly.
• The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.
• The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.
• The rich aren't like us, they pay less taxes.
• Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.
• The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.
• We are not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through.
• Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.
• A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.