Peter De Vries Quotes

I am very Aristotelian in approach - not in detail - so I always find I'm saying things that get people frustrated like 'It's a matter of balance and judgement'. To a lot of philosophers these are terrible words because they're admitting of vagueness and uncertainty. The more I've done philosophy, the more I've become convinced that that is the way it is.

People are afraid of detail and complexity.

My books tend to have a lot of questions in them, and they tend to avoid black and white, for lack of a better metaphor.

The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.

I love telling stories, but I also am more aware now of how complex reality is and how difficult it is to really explain what happened or how I felt. Maybe that sometimes makes me a little bit vague, because I don't want to really put my finger on anything or set it in stone.

In general, I like contradictions and complex situations.

That's what I learned from World War II. Things are always more complicated than most people believe.

We have this desire for everything to be explained to us. But if you go through your daily actions, very little ends up having a written-down explanation for why things happen, or why people do specific things. So it made sense to me to reflect the human condition that not every action has an explanation. We act, and then later maybe come to an understanding about it, or maybe not.

You know, we have little bits of understanding, glimpses, a little bit of light here and there, but there's a tremendous amount of darkness, which is a challenge. I think life would be pretty boring if we understood everything. It's better if we don't understand anything and know that we don't, that's the important part.

We must learn to live with contradictions, because they lead to deeper and more effective understanding.

I find Hollywood gives these pat stories, and they're reassuring stories, and I don't really want to give people that. Hollywood does all that work. I'm offering, sometimes, an alternative to that. The answers aren't black-and-white. There may not even be answers in certain instances. The ground is not necessarily solid, either. So you've got to keep awake the whole time, even after the movie is over.

When somebody asks, 'Whats the answer to all of these questions?' that's absurd. There is no answer, there are answers, along the way.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.

It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.

I find the more you analyze, the less you really know.

I wouldn't like to live in a world where everything's as cut-and-dried as most people think it is

There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

Sometimes a simple question could have a complicated answer.

I think this is one of those issues where the deeper you dig, the murkier it gets - and everyone who has spent a lot of time thinking about these issues.

A world of contradictions, wherein everything is gray and almost nothing is black and white.

I can never give a 'yes' or a 'no.' I don't believe everything in life can be settled by a monosyllable.

I asked the Zebra, are you black with white stripes? Or white with black stripes? And the zebra asked me, Are you good with bad habits? Or are you bad with good habits? Are you noisy with quiet times? Or are you quiet with noisy times? Are you happy with some sad days? Or are you sad with some happy days? Are you neat with some sloppy ways? Or are you sloppy with some neat ways? And on and on and on and on and on and on he went. I’ll never ask a zebra about stripes...again.

Nothing in its essence is one way or the other.

For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.

I know it was more than that. But it was also less than that, too.