Peter De Vries

"Call me, Ishmael. Feel absolutely free to."

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

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

"Nostalgia, as his Uncle Joshua had said, ain't what it used to be."

"We've got to purge Aristotle from our system." "I've never read him so why do I have to purge him from my system?" "It's proof of his grip on Western Man that he dominates the thinking of people who have never heard of him."

"Man is vile, I know, but people are wonderful."

"Or look at it this way. Psychoanalysis is a permanent fad. A vogue here to stay because it tells an old story in a new way. I mean the traditional conflict between flesh and spirit, as viewed by the Christianity now supposedly outmoded, isn't likely to ease up because we have scrapped the notion of sin and now speak instead of the ego and superego between them riding herd on something called the id. It's the same keg of nails any way you open it. "Id" isn't just another big word, either. Far from it."

"We must love one another, yes, yes, that's all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other."

"The last place to have a ball, my dear Mrs. DelBelly, is at a formal dance."

"He takes satisfaction in having quite lived by his stoic creed: give what you can and take what comes. Concession not freely given is in the end forcibly extracted anyway. For we are all swimmers ephemerally buoyed by what will engulf us at the last; still dreaming of islands though the mainland has been lost; swept remorselessly out to sea while we spread our arms to the beautiful shore."