Brian

“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.”
― Peter De Vries, The Vale of Laughter

“What rot, I could hear Brett say it. What rot! When you were with the English you got into the habit of using English expressions in your thinking. The English spoken language — the upper classes, anyway — must have fewer words than the Eskimo. Of course I didn’t know anything about the Eskimo. Maybe the Eskimo was a fine language. Say the Cherokee. I didn’t know anything about the Cherokee, either. The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything. I liked them, though. I liked the way they talked.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“I once tried drowning my sorrows, till I found out they could swim.”
― Peter De Vries, The Vale of Laughter

“One is not entitled to contempt for something to which one is not equal.”
― Peter De Vries, The Vale of Laughter